Scientific collaborations are increasingly being supported through emerging communication and computational technologies. However, these efforts to develop collaboratories for a variety of scientific fields have been met with mixed success. While technologies such as e-mail or shared databases are clearly very important to the support of scientific collaboration, projects which go beyond these have encountered numerous social and technical difficulties.

Our workshop on July 19-20 will explore the technical underpinnings of collaboration. We have invited researchers and developers from industry, academia, and government to identify, define, and discuss the state of collaboratory technologies and the state-of-the-art and state-of-the-practice in collaboratory technology deployment.

We will examine three broad classes of issues as they pertain to the technical underpinnings of collaboration:

• What tools and techniques are currently used in collaboratories?
  
• What capabilities and activities should be supported and how?
  
• What are the technology issues facing collaboratories and the development of future collaboratory technology infrastructure?
  

At this workshop, our goal is to define issues, assess the current state of understanding, and lay the groundwork for subsequent events. This workshop is part of a larger project which aims to understand what technical and social factors produce success in collaboratories. Our ultimate goal is to provide design prescriptions, technical components, standardized terminology, and social insights so that collaboratories become routine infrastructure for scientific research.