The concept global accelerator network (GAN) has found considerable interest in the accelerator community world wide. There have been two study groups initiated by ICFA which were followed by two workshops, one in Cornell in March 2002 and one in Brookhaven in September 2002.

A standing ICFA sub-panel REAP has been formed to foster further activities and the progress on the topic has been presented at the major accelerator conferences in the last 3 years. A number of activities have been started recently. A proposal has been worked out to create a novel, universal communication tool (MVL) to support collaborations to build, install and test accelerator hardware and software which allows the virtual presence of the remote experts at the site of the activity. Activities have been started at Cornell to create a global accelerator seminar network. In the context of these recent developments, the general goal of this workshop is to determine adequate criteria for universal communication tools to support collaborations in the field of accelerators. In doing this a variety of collaboration and remote access tools relevant to remote operations and accelerator physics experiments will be examined. Reports on recent experience in remote operations will help in determining these criteria. Information will be exchanged with experts in the field of human-computer communications, networking and communication technology.