ECSCW 2003 Computer Supported Scientific Collaboration (CSSC) workshop report

Abstract

The Eighth European Computer Supported Cooperative Work conference (ECSCW 2003) provided a venue to gather researchers interested in the study of scientific collaborations and their technology support. The organizers, Karen S. Baker, Geoffrey C. Bowker and Helena Karasti, started to work together in 2002 on a National Science Foundation funded BioDiversity and EcoInformatics (BDEI) project 'Designing an Infrastructure for Heterogeneity in Ecosystem Data, Collaborators and Organizations' (http://pal.Iternet.edu/projects/02dgo/). Having encountered a multitude of challenging issues in their study with the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER, http://Iternet.edu), the ECSCW workshop offered an opportunity for a community dialogue focusing on Computer Supported Scientific Collaboration (CSSC). The suite of selected position papers at the workshop by Debra Cash & Howard Cash, Jenny Fry, Timothy Koschmann, Flemming Meier, Erja Mustonen-Ollila, Giuseppe Psaila & Davide Brugali, and Sanna Talja ([16], <http://pal.Iternet.edu/projects/ecscw03/) represented a wide range of work relating to scientific collaborations.