Track Introduction

Teams, Organizations, and, indeed, societies exist to create value that their stakeholders cannot create as individuals. Collaboration means joint effort toward a goal. This minitracks seeks to advance knowledge of the individual, organizational, societal, and technical issues that affect the outcomes attained through collaboration. The papers in this track cut across many application domains industry, academia, military, and government. The papers span the range of scientific enquiry, from the most theoretical to the most applied. The authors take a variety of epistemological perspectives -- logical positivist, interpretivist, criticalist, and engineering approaches all appear in this year¿s track. This track began a number of years ago with the increased interest in both Group Support Systems and Negotiation Support Systems minitracks. Out of this interest, the Collaboration Systems and Technology Track emerged. It consists of minitracks in eight areas.