The Collaboration Agreement

The Collaboration Agreement is a template for promoting productive conversations and working relationships for creative collaborators. The template document guides participants through a structured exercise for communicating goals, assumptions, and expectations.

What’s great about collaboration?

Collaborations can create creative alchemy! Creativity can be transformed by the process of collaboration into something greater than the sum of its parts. To some degree, all creative works are collaborative. No individual completes a creative project without input, criticism, influence, assistance, or engagement with others. But creative projects are often wrenched away from their collaborative roots when it comes time for funding, professionalizing, and historicizing.

What’s problematic about collaboration?

Everything that is wrong with the world and human interaction is potentially a pitfall of collaboration. When collaborations go wrong, relationships and artworks can be destroyed, and the cracks often appear along the fault lines of historic bias and discrimination.

What’s The Collaboration Agreement?

The Collaboration Agreement is meant to be a living document that you can be adapted according to need, and change many times over the lifetime of a collaboration. The different questions and sections are just suggestions – users can ignore what doesn’t apply or elaborate in great detail where it’s important.

This isn’t a legally binding or enforceable document; rather it is a set of labeled sections of questions that can help a group structure communication around shared work. The labels themselves were developed by thinking through some of the possible problems that can arise around collaboration.

Please make a copy of The Collaboration Agreement document template in order to edit.

References and Resources on Collaboration and Governance

I looked at many sources while developing this document. An often updated (and possibly someday annotated) working version of the bibliography can be found here. A few useful online resources include:

Manifesto for Tender Collaborative Work by press_press
https://presspress.info/content/3-document/2-manifesto-for-tender-collaborative-work/a-tender-talk.pdf

Study Collaboration - Resources by Study Center for Group Work
https://studycollaboration.com/#resources

The Loomio Cooperative Handbook
https://loomio.coop/working_together