Addressing durability in collaborative organising: Event atmospheres and polyrhythmic affectivity

Abstract

Collaborative organising is known to burn like a rocket: it thrives on intense passion, relationality and creativity but quickly falls into pieces. This article explores the underestimated role of events and their affective atmospheres to sustain collaborative work. Drawing insights from two ethnographic field studies within an open-source software community and a network of impact entrepreneurs, we introduce the notion of ‘polyrhythmic affectivity’ at the core of polycentric governance. It encapsulates how frictional reverberances between three atmospherically experienced affective intensities – togetherness, dissonance and mutuality – are able to maintain emergent yet enduring order. We argue that the collective motivational force of collaborative organising, can be stabilised through a process of ‘affective commoning’ to sustain collaborative atmospheres as shared creative resources.