The World Wide Web has from its inception promoted informal collaboration: personal web pages offer pointers to interesting sites; voluntary registration and word-of-mouth yield enormous searchable indexes; email integrated in browsers makes it easy to forward web citations to interested groups. At the same time, interactive collaborations such as joint authoring, group discussion and simple workflows go without direct support. It is clear that a richer framework is required to fully support these kinds of collaborations.
The goal of this workshop is to establish a context for the WWW Consortium as it proceeds to recommend protocol changes that will address collaboration requirements. The focus will be on extensions to the Web protocols that support wide-area asynchronous collaborative applications, particularly extensions that can have impact by early '96. Presentations during the first day of the workshop will paint a broader picture of potential for collaboration on the Web that will frame this focused effort and that may suggest additional follow-on activities.
Participation in the workshop is by invitation only based on short written proposals for sessions or position statements that address the goals of the workshop (submission details are below.) The workshop format will be one day of short presentations -- primarily demonstrations of working systems -- followed by a day of break-out sessions on topics suggested during the first day.
Proposals for presentations are about implemented collaboration systems, applications and groupware technologies -- including commercial products -- or technologies that play a significant role in implementation of collaboration applications. The program will include a representative sample of different types of systems. We are aware of a number of working collaborative systems which are listed at:
http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Collaboration/
Themes that we hope to highlight in presentations as well as discussion include but are not limited to: