The academic popularity of the topic of electronic cross-organizational and cross-border collaboration is perhaps best evident in the large number of publications on this topic. For example, a systematic review of 1180 papers published between 2000 and 2007 in only six information systems (IS) journals reveals that 80 papers are related to electronic cross-organizational and cross-border collaboration. This EJIS special issue attracted a record number of 66 paper submissions of which eight were finally accepted for publication. In the context of this special issue, we define the focus of interest as ‘the integration of people, systems, processes and infrastructure across organizations, borders, nations and world regions to enable productive teamwork towards accomplishing mutual goals’.

This article presents a value exchange model of privacy and security for electronic customer relationship management within an electronic commerce environment. Enterprises and customers must carefully manage these new virtual relationships in order to ensure that they both derive value from them and minimize unintended consequences that result from the concomitant exchange of personal information that occurs in e-commerce. Based upon a customer’s requirements of privacy and an enterprise requirement to establish markets and sell goods and services, there is a value exchange relationship. The model is an integration of the customer sphere of privacy, sphere of security, and privacy/security sphere of implementation.

This article describes the need for virtual workspaces and then discusses the architecture, design, and development of GroupSystems for the World Wide Web (Web) (GSWeb), an HTML/JavaScript Web-based Group Support System (GSS). To design and develop GSWeb, a user-driven approach was employed which drew on feedback from users and teams working with a GSWeb prototype, interviews with GSS users and facilitators, and over 10 years of experience with face-to-face group support research, development, and design. GSWeb was built using HTML 3.0 and JavaScript for client interface rendering. The result is an application interface that is like the familiar Graphical User Interface (GUI) interfaces that are today a defacto standard. GSWeb is currently being used by teams from all over the world, and continuing design and development still relies on feedback and requests from actual users to refine and extend the features that will enable virtual teams to be productive and accomplish real work. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.