1. Software systems evolve over time. To facilitate this evolution, the coordination language Reo offers operations to dynamically reconfigure the topology of component connectors. This paper is the first in a series which presents techniques for reasoning about reconfiguration in Reo. This paper presents algebraic laws relating connector construction and reconfiguration. The following paper in the series presents a logic for reasoning about connector behaviour in the presence of dynamic reconfiguration, along with its model checking algorithm. 2. Software systems evolve over time. To facilitate this, the coordination language Reo offers operations to dynamically reconfigure the topology of component connectors. We present a semantics of Reo in the presence of reconfiguration, and a logic, and its model checking algorithm, for reasoning about connector behaviour in this setting.