Many working environments require that geographicallydistributed or co-located work group members work together -supported by software -in developing and refining one commonly shared resource in the same time. Hence, synchronous collaboration is common to various contexts and domains, examples being drawing, searching, text editing, and game solving. However, little work has been done in identifying design patterns for the design of systems for such collaboration. This line of research aims at identifying, relating and evaluating such design patterns for providing: a). a better understanding of the design processes of synchronous collaborative software, and b). a repository of knowledge comprising best practices in such design processes for practitioners.