M/C Journal ‘collaborate’ Issue Now Available

Collaboration is a highly desirable and, increasingly, often a mandated element in many modes of Australian (and international) research, creative and business practice – and a factor on which successful and innovative outcomes, as well as funding, often depend. In many cases, however, participants in collaborative projects have a limited understanding of collaboration (in theory and practice) beyond that of a general concept, tossed about with nods of approval but rarely unpacked. In other fields of DIY content production, from open source software development to the large- scale distributed collaboration on projects such as the Wikipedia, collaboration often happens perhaps even more intuitively, but nonetheless produces results which can usually stand up to serious professional scrutiny. So how, and why, do we collaborate?