Coordination in Socio-technical Systems: Where are we now? Where do we go next?

Despite Socio-Technical Systems (STS) have been defined and described long ago, and dedicated software engineering techniques and guidelines have been designed and assessed in different application domains, the issue of coordinating people and software artefacts in these STS has been widely recognised only recently, and gained momentum to generate some promising engineering approaches. In this paper, we aim to shed some light into the current status of the research landscape concerned with engineering coordination within STS. Accordingly, we highlight the main challenges yet to be tackled as stemming from real world problems, present the opportunities to deal with them as arising from different research threads, and delve into a few selected coordination approaches for specific STS application domains.