Collaborative Networked Organizations (CNO) correspond to a very active and steadily growing area. For instance, Virtual enterprises / virtual organizations (VE/VO) are already supported by a large research and business practice community. Also, Professional Virtual Communities (PVC) suggest new ways of work and put the emphasis on collaborative networks of human actors. Further to these main lines, other collaborative forms and patterns of collaborative behavior are emerging, not only in industry, but also in service sector, as well as governmental and non-government social organizations, e.g. the collaborative networks for rescue tasks in disaster situations, time bank organization, etc

The concept of breeding environment is now understood as a fundamental entity to enable dynamic collaborative organizations.

Recent developments emphasize the need for better understanding and characterization of the basic principles and mechanisms for collaborative networks planning and operation. The main requirements include building a sounder foundation, namely in terms of proper theoretical principles and formal models capturing the concepts, entities, behavior, and operations of the CNOs, and technology-independent infrastructure architectures. More holistic approaches are urgently needed.

However, while the aims are becoming clearer, there is still a lot that remains to be understood and commonly agreed regarding the concept of virtualization in all its facets, calling for multi-faceted reference models. In other words, although the potential advantages of the Virtual Organizations are well known at the conceptual level, their practical implantation is still far from the expectations. In fact, in spite of the growing awareness of the potential benefits of collaborative networks, a number of important barriers or inhibitors can be mentioned, e.g. lack of common reference models, lack of effective interoperability mechanisms and approaches, lack of supporting infrastructures that still require detailed characterization, heavy design and engineering efforts, being difficult to choose among many offered market technologies and tools with too short life cycles, etc.

Furthermore, there are major cultural and legal obstacles, a lack of decisive leadership on the industry sectors, and still too little done on the common practices, ethical principles, and the enhancement / enforcement mechanisms that could help trust building among organizations.

In this context PRO-VE has already established its recognized position as the most focused scientific / technical conference in the area, offering a major opportunity for the presentation and discussion of both the latest research developments and industrial practice case studies. Following the IFIP vision, PRO-VE offers a forum for collaboration among different regions of the world.