This mini-track focuses on challenges presented by geographical, temporal, and cultural distribution among individuals working in teams, organizations, and communities. The explosion of communication technologies has facilitated the growth of virtual environments, but it has also resulted in confusion over choice of communication technologies that may be appropriate for a particular task, overload of information to be sorted through, and a sense of isolation from coworkers. In addition, teams must be formed and become productive quickly, e.g., competitive advantage for project development teams is frequently based on being able to bring a new product to market more quickly than competitors. This environment is further complicated as individual members may work in multiple virtual teams with multiple, often conflicting priorities. In virtual environments, managing these different relationships, loyalties, and priorities, in addition to developing new relationships, presents a definite challenge. We sought papers addressing these issues from an organizational, managerial, team, community, or individual perspective, as well as papers on enabling technologies and their use in this environment. The resulting eight papers published in the HICSS-39 proceedings investigate a variety of important topics of interest to researchers and practitioners. Collaboration among distributed professionals happens daily n today’s organizations. Qureshi and De Leeuw investigate how collaborative technologies are used in such context to provide insight into the processes that enable intellectual bandwidth to be mobilized. In the same vein, Espinosa and Pickering look at how coordination costs and outcomes are affected by time zones through interviews of 23 global team members. They identify mechanisms used to overcome the difficulties arising from time separation. Many studies of virtual teams focus on completely virtual vs. non-virtual teams. Lojeski, Reilly, and Dominick propose and study virtual distance as a construct representing a mix between FTF and virtual interactions of such teams. Tarmizi, de Vreede, and Zigurs discuss communities of practice (COP) and the challenges faced by facilitators of such communities. Knowledge sharing by members of virtual teams is of critical interest to researchers and practitioners. Wu, Lin, and Lin use Social Exchange Theory and develop a model of shared knowledge to explore the critical factors and causal relationships among knowledge sharing on virtual teams. Furumo and Pearson compare four task/technology conditions across virtual and face-to-face team members. Virtual team members reported lower levels of trust, cohesion, outcome satisfaction, and process satisfaction. However, their output was essentially the same as individual working in face-to-face teams. Instant messaging is a relatively new but increasingly important communication medium used by virtual teams. Rennecker, Dennis, and Hanson use Goffman’s characterization of ‘‘front’’ and ‘‘backstage’’ interaction practices to analyze how the use of instant messaging in both face-to-face and technology-mediated meetings alters interaction boundaries. Fang and Neufeld investigate the influence of virtual team participation on worker commitment. They use Wenger’s practice-based learning perspective and theory of legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) to conduct a longitudinal, qualitative analysis of commitment in one open source software project. Results indicate that commitment is strongly associated with engagement in LPP processes (participation, learning and identity transformation).