Preface to the 1st International Hands-on Workshop on Collaborative Modeling (HoWCoM 2021)

The ability to collaboratively engineer models of systems has become a particularly important topic in Model-Driven Engineering (MDE). It is due to the increasing complexity of nowadays’ systems that their engineering requires a coordinated interplay between stakeholders. Collaboration is often seen as an enabling technique, and a tool-related aspect in MDE. Yet, collaborative modeling has typically been addressed at the foundations level. Collaborative MDE tools have not been in the focus of any scientific event so far. Given the recent trends in the research and application of collaborative MDE, especially considering that collaborative MDE has become a prominent part of relevant industrial R&D projects, we found that it was important to organize a workshop that would allow us to put tools in the spotlight and evaluate them from a practical standpoint. This workshop intended to leverage a rare opportunity provided by the online format of the 2021 edition of MoDELS. The online format enabled studying the dynamics of collaborative modeling endeavors in a realistic environment, with physically distanced users forced to rely on the means of collaboration provided by the tools under study.