COOP'06 is the 7th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems. The conference aims at bringing together researchers who contribute to the design of cooperative systems and their integration into organizational settings. The challenge of the conference is to advance:

• Understanding and modeling of collaborative work which is mediated by technical artifacts;

• Design methodologies for cooperative work analysis and cooperative systems design;

• New technologies supporting cooperation;

• Concepts and socio-technical solutions for the application of cooperative systems.

The COOP conferences are based on the conviction that cooperative systems design requires a deep understanding of the cooperative work of groups and organizations, involving both artifacts and social practices. This is the reason why contributions from all disciplines contributing to/related to the field of cooperative systems design are considered as relevant, including computer science (CSCW, HCI, Information Systems, Knowledge Engineering, etc.), organizational and management sciences, sociology, psychology, anthropology, ergonomics, linguistics, etc.

Various approaches and methodologies are considered, theoretical contributions as well as empirical studies reports or software development experiences on topics such as:

• Analysis of collaborative work situations;

• Conceptual frameworks for understanding cooperative work;

• Guidelines for designing cooperative systems;

• The influence of new technologies (mobile Computing, ubiquitous computing, etc.) on cooperation;

• Expertise sharing and learning in cooperative work;

• Communities and new forms of organization;

• Innovative technological solutions and user interfaces;

• Methods for participatory design of cooperative systems.

In 2006, COOP puts a special emphasis on the issue of the “seamless integration of artifacts and conversations – enhanced concepts of infrastructure for communication”. The emergence and distribution of cooperative systems has been accompanied by an increased communication workload. This is characterized by increased information exchange, message overflow, numerous interruptions of work, cognitive overload, or a dominance of virtual context. To alleviate and improve the situation, greater integration of conversational acts (e.g. message exchange) and documents is clearly required.

43 long papers were submitted for COOP'06; from these 18 were selected to be presented in the conference and published in this book. An additional set of approx. 20 short papers is also presented at the conference and published in a supplementary booklet. The conference program is completed by a workshop programme and a doctoral consortium.

The papers included in the proceedings draw from a rich empirical background including studies in healthcare, homecare, software-development, architectural design, marine insurance industry, and learning in university settings. They integrate different theoretical foundations and conceptual frameworks to further the understanding of cooperative work, build advanced conceptual frameworks, derive design implications for information systems, and present new technological concepts for cooperative systems.

Michael Buckland is the keynote speaker of COOP'06; and an abstract of his talk is included in this book. Michael Buckland comes from the School of Information Management & Systems which is part of the University of California and located in Berkeley. He has contributed to renew the approach of documents particularly by going back to the foundational work of the French archivists like Suzanne Briet. His famous papers “What is a “document”?” and “Information as Thing” are surprisingly relevant in the context of the CSCW debate about the importance of the materiality of coordinative artefacts.

The papers in this book are presented in alphabetical order. We hope that you will find them interesting to read and that they will inspire further discussions and further research on cooperative system design.

Acknowledgements

Many persons and institutions helped to make the conference and the publication of this book possible. We would like to thank them for their great efforts. Our special thanks go to the members of the program committee who took the responsibility for selecting the papers to be presented on the conference and to be included in the proceedings; they fulfilled their task with great care and provided helpful comments to the authors. We also want to thank the helpers behind the scenes: Michael Prilla (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) for configuring and maintaining the conference tool in the internet; L'Hedi Zaher (Université de Technologie de Troyes) for designing and maintaining the conference web page in the internet; Alexandra Frerichs (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) for the quality assurance of all camera ready papers.

We are indebted to the CONSEIL GENERAL DES BOUCHES DU RHONE for supporting us at the conference site in Carry-le-Rouet.

Bochum, February 2006

The editors, Parina Hassanaly, Thomas Herrmann, Gabriele Kunau and Manuel Zacklad