Following two successful Workshops on Self-Stabilizing Systems in Austin (1989), and Las Vegas (1995), the third Workshop on Self-Stabilizing Systems was held at the University of California, Santa Barbara (immediately after the 16th Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing). The year 1997 marks the 25th year of research on Self-Stabilizing Systems. The workshop provides a forum for the presentation of new research results, and the identification of future directions in this rapidly growing area of research.