Realizing the vision of the federated collaboratories will require the development of many layers of abstractions ranging from hardware, networking, federation architecture, scientific workflows, and domain-specific models and tools to enable collaborative discovery.  In preparation for upcoming workshops focused on gathering information to be included in the ERN Mid-Scale preproposal, this session will be an ERN community forum to discuss what the “federated collaboratory” might look like from both a hardware and software perspective as well as what federation should look like as we strive for a seamless collaborative sharing  experience. Another goal of the session is to start identifying an ERN technical team who will lead the architecting/federating/software strategies for the Mid-Scale proposal.