We see crisis all around us: environmental crisis, social crisis, political crisis, as well as moments of organisational, collaborative and personal crisis. For the fifth Collaborative Practices Salon we took crisis as our theme. We considered crisis in collaboration, the gathering together of people with diverse skills and experience to address a crisis problem. Crises tend not to be isolated problems but to span a wide range of disciplines, sectors and participants. Because of this, and because the impacts of crises are similarly dispersed, it makes sense that crisis problems are addressed collaboratively. We also considered collaboration in crisis, what happens when the collaboration itself faces challenges and setbacks. We invited three people to speak to the theme: Kirsten Wehner, who shared her collaboration responding to the mass fish death events in the Barka/Baaka (Darling River); Naomi Hay, who spoke about her experiences of collaborative design practices for climate disasters; and Collaborative Culture’s own Maya Haviland, who read from a journal chronicling a week of crisis in a long-standing collaboration, and the emotional repercussions of crisis on the self.
After hearing from Kirsten, Naomi and Maya, we invited participants to discuss their own experiences at the intersections of collaboration, crisis and the self in small groups. We asked people to consider how collaboration might help us to work through crisis, and how collaboration might create crisis. We then reconvened and together explored how we, both as individuals and as collaborators, might keep ourselves well and retain hopeful momentum in situations of crisis.