GROUP

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 2012 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work -- GROUP'12. This is the 17th gathering in this influential international conference series which despite sporadic name changes -- from Organizational Information Systems, to Organizational Computing Systems, to Group -- remains focused on the challenges of evaluating and developing socio-technical systems to support collaborative work among individuals, within and across groups, organizations, and geo-political boundaries. We find ourselves again on lovely Sanibel Island, Florida. We are very pleased with the commitment to GROUP by our colleagues who have generously contributed their time and effort to organize the conference, review papers, lead the Doctoral Colloquium, convene workshops, chair sessions, and be student volunteers. The conference would not be possible without their efforts.

The GROUP'12 call for papers attracted 94 submissions (64 papers and 30 notes) from Asia, Latin America, Europe, and North America. The program committee accepted 24 papers and 11 notes covering a wide variety of topics including: awareness and avatars - visualizing speech, workflow and identity; understanding collaboration in organizations; citizen science and healthcare - real world communities; collaborative systems and group editing; cross-cultural chat, file sync and realtime dating; behavior patterns in online communities; understanding information in social media; and methods for understanding and supporting online communities. In addition to two preconference workshops, we are able to host our fourth Doctoral Colloquium. Generous funding from the National Science Foundation allows us to bring together advanced Ph.D. students from around the world for a full-day program of interaction with leading researchers in our field. During the poster session you will be able to see what these students are working on, and you will also find posters from other researchers in academia and industry.