Proceedings of the hypertext 2008 workshop on Collaboration and collective intelligence

Welcome to the first Hypertext Web Science Workshop (HT WebScience 2008). At last year's Hypertext Conference there was a Birds of a Feather meeting to discuss the new discipline of Web Science, proposed by Tim Berners-Lee, Wendy Hall, Nigel Shadbolt and Danny Weitzner (among others). They have suggested that we need a new academic and research discipline to understand the Web and its impact on the way people think, behave and interact. Web Science is about understanding how technical innovation changes practice, and how behavior in the small translates to behavior in the large. Web Science is of great potential interest to those people in the Hypertext Community, as our work has always been about the coming together of people and technology; last year's lively discussion has spawned this year's workshop, with the goal of creating a venue within the Hypertext conference in which we can help to explore, define and shape the new Web Science discipline. We hoped to attract not only people with a technical expertise, but also those who study the human aspects of Web phenomena, such as on-line communities, and the impact of these technologies on society. We chose to focus on collaborative systems and emerging structure, as these are core areas for existing hypertext research, and we have accepted 10 papers from a wide variety of different institutions and countries.