This is the Proceedings of the OZCHI'96 Workshop on the Next Generation of CSCW Systems. Thanks must go to Andy Cockburn for inspiring the name of the workshop and thus giving it a (general) theme! The idea for this workshop grew out of discussions with John Venable concerning the Next Generation of CASE Tools workshop which he'd attended in 1995 and 1996. With CSCW research becoming more prominent within the CHI community in Australasia, it seemed a good opportunity to get people together at OZCHI'96 who share this interest. Focusing the workshop on next-generation CSCW system issues produced paper submissions which explored very diverse areas of CSCW, but which all share a common thread of "Where do we go from here?", and, perhaps even more importantly "Why should be doing this?".