Coordination programming helps to separate concerns in the programming of the coordination activities in complex applications software. It separates the development, verification, maintenance, and reuse of the coordination and communication protocols, from the development of the rest of the application; coincidentally making these entities into standalone products. The IWIM coordination model is briefly reviewed, and a formal automata theoretic version of the model is developed, capturing the essentials of the framework in a fibration based approach. Specifically, families of worker automata have their communication governed by a state of a manager automaton, whose transitions correspond to reconfigurations. © 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B. V.