Philosophy of Collaboration

Information Systems require intense collaboration to design, maintain and improve. Research on collaboration and collaboration systems has achieved sufficient maturity and scope where an overall conceptual definition of Collaboration is clearly needed. This paper proposes terminology to bridge between isolated communities of collaboration researchers from various fields, defining key terms and making arguments about what collaboration is and is not. It offers a preliminary philosophical description of Collaboration based on epistemological, metaphysical, and axiological insights, and invites the collaboration research community to join a conversation toward formalizing a fully-realized philosophy of collaboration.