Over the last two decades, many organizations and individuals have relied on electronic collaboration between distributed teams of humans, computer applications, and/or autonomous robots to achieve higher productivity and produce joint products that would have been impossible to develop without the contributions of multiple collaborators. Technology has evolved from standalone tools, to open systems supporting collaboration in multi-organizational settings, and from general purpose tools to specialized collaboration grids. Future collaboration solutions that fully realize the promises of electronic collaboration require advancements in networking, technology and systems, user interfaces and interaction paradigms, and interoperation with application-specific components and tools. The Ninth International Conference on Collaborative Computing (CollaborateCom 2013) will continue to serve as a premier international forum for discussion among academic and industrial researchers, practitioners, and students interested in collaborative networking, technology and systems, and applications.