Dear Reader This is a book about mobile virtual work. It aims at clarifying the basic concepts and showing present practices and future challenges. The roots of the book are in the collaboration of few European practitioners and - searchers, who met each other under the umbrella of the Swedish SALTSA programme (see next page) in January 2002 in Stockholm. The group was first called 'ICT, Mobility and Work Organisation' but redefined itself quickly as 'Mobile Virtual Cooperative Work' group. The change of the name reflects the development of reasoning in the group. We could not find much material on mobile work, certainly not systematic studies, - though a growing interest in mobile technologies and services could be found. Practices of telework and virtual organizations were better known, but we were convinced that the combination with mobile work was so- thing different and new. Our main target became to understand what it was all about. The next step was an expert meeting in October 2004 at Ranas Castle again in Sweden. A wider group of experts was invited to present their views on mobile virtual work and ideas about book chapters from different perspectives of working life. Some of the expertise could be found through the network of the AMI@Work family created by the New Working En- ronments unit of the European Commission's Information Society Dir- torate-General. Also close collaboration was developed with the related MOSAIC program."

This book has grown from a workshop that brought together researchers and practitioners from a wide range of areas, including the safety domain. The focus of the workshop was on the well-known issue of organisational learning and organisational memory. The special merit of the book is that it combines the experiences of two usually separate disciplines i.e. safety science, where the main focus is on the codification of accidents, and knowledge management in service organisations, where the main focus is on exchanging successes.
The focus of some contributions is on individual and group processes, others on organisational strategy or societal and environmental issues.

Some key questions addressed in this book are:
- How can an organisation learn from its successes and failures, from its experiences and accidents?
- How can we prevent the loss of knowledge caused by intensive employee turnover or retirement?
- How can implicit knowledge be shared with colleagues and newcomers?
- To what extent can Information and Communication Technology (ICT) help to solve these problems?

Dear Reader This is a book about mobile virtual work. It aims at clarifying the basic concepts and showing present practices and future challenges. The roots of the book are in the collaboration of few European practitioners and - searchers, who met each other under the umbrella of the Swedish SALTSA programme (see next page) in January 2002 in Stockholm. The group was first called 'ICT, Mobility and Work Organisation' but redefined itself quickly as 'Mobile Virtual Cooperative Work' group. The change of the name reflects the development of reasoning in the group. We could not find much material on mobile work, certainly not systematic studies, - though a growing interest in mobile technologies and services could be found. Practices of telework and virtual organizations were better known, but we were convinced that the combination with mobile work was so- thing different and new. Our main target became to understand what it was all about. The next step was an expert meeting in October 2004 at Ranas Castle again in Sweden. A wider group of experts was invited to present their views on mobile virtual work and ideas about book chapters from different perspectives of working life. Some of the expertise could be found through the network of the AMI@Work family created by the New Working En- ronments unit of the European Commission's Information Society Dir- torate-General. Also close collaboration was developed with the related MOSAIC program."

This book looks at the social aspects of how virtual and geographically dispersed groups work together using information and communication tools (groupware). It introduces the basic concepts and brings together ideas from various disciplines to provide an integrated approach to the evaluation and design of groupware technology. Key topics include: =B7 Why some collaboration technologies succeed and others fail =B7 The conditions needed for successful distributed collaboration =B7 How to take a systematic, user-oriented, design-related approach to the evaluation of computer supported collaboration Primarily intended for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying Information and Communication Technology, Human-Computer Interaction, Communication Sciences, Human Factors, Interface Design and Multimedia Systems, this book will also be of interest to researchers, practitioners and lecturers in social and organisational sciences.