Proceedings of the 2005 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work

We are pleased to be able to hold Group 2005 on Sanibel Island also this year. As those delegates who also attended Group 2003 will know already, Sanibel Island and the southwest coast of Florida in general is a uniquely beautiful place that offers the ideal setting for catching up with colleagues and friends as well as for getting acquainted with new ones. We're certain you'll all enjoy it.Group 2005 is the latest in a long series of highly influential conferences devoted to the issues of modeling and implementation associated with collaborative activity, with special emphasis on their interplay with organizational and behavioral issues. The conference series began as the conference on Office Information Systems some 25 years ago and despite sporadic name changes --- from Organizational Information Systems, to Organizational Computing Systems, to Group --- the conference has consistently focused on the challenges of developing computer system to support collaborative work in organizational settings.Although ACM SIGGROUP, the special interest group that has successfully sponsored the conference over the years, was 'disbanded' as of 30 January 2005, the Group conference is alive and well. The conference is now sponsored by ACM's Executive Committee, and we are convinced that the Group conference will continue --- until, hopefully, the issues of developing computer system to support collaborative work in organizational settings have been sorted out or at least understood. It may take a while... In the last few years, the functionality and applicability of systems for supporting group work has expanded, leading to their growing application to organizational information, communication, and cooperation processes. This provides opportunities to study their technical and social impacts. Often the integration of new technology with existing or new organizational practices is very challenging. The knowledge gained from such experiences is a valuable resource for all those who plan to, or have integrated computer-based tools for the support of group interaction. At the same time we observe a growing influence of the Internet, mobile computing, agent systems, ubiquitous computing, and virtual reality. We can expect that these new technologies will also exert a large influence on organizational structures and processes. These new technologies are exciting in their own right, but their technological and organizational integration to support groups raises many interesting questions and is a challenging new research agenda.We would like to acknowledge the hard work and dedication of all the conference committee and student-volunteer workers. We would especially like to thank Mark Ackerman and Gloria Mark for coordinating the paper submission and review process. As an innovation, this Group 2005 invited the submissions of short papers. The purpose of this is to bring research into the Group community that is relevant and original, but might not fit well within the traditional long papers program. This, we believe, has turned out to be a success. We would therefore like to thank Christine Halverson and Jorg Haake for handling the short papers review process. The end result of the unwavering commitment of the paper chairs to the highest standards can be found in this excellent collection of papers and short papers.