If you are the average computer scientist, "distributed collaboration" is a buzzword to you and you probably do not know much about this field. That is because it is an emerging area not associated with a large body of knowledge or even a text book! While this might be bad news if you are a practitioner, it is actually very good news if you want to be a researcher, since interesting open problems are easier to find in a new area. Moreover, it is not an entirely brand new field--it is an interdisciplinary area giving new angles to several traditional fields. Traditional computer science has assumed that a single user interacts with a computer program at any one time. A whole range of issues emerge when you decide to violate this fundamental assumption by allowing multiple, distributed users to simultaneously communicate with a program. Research in operating and distributed systems, programming environments, user-interface frameworks, software engineering, and transaction models has started to study some of these issues, but there is much left to do. So if you have an aptitude in any of these fields (and specially in more than one of them), then this might be the area for you.