Our Practices — The Careoperative

Guiding principles

Our Code of Collaboration opens with five articles that describe how we aspire to treat each other and the work. These are not aspirational slogans — they are behavioral commitments, named so that we can hold each other to account.

Membership and participation

Not everyone can be equally present all the time — and pretending otherwise would be dishonest about how academic life actually works. At our annual meeting, members choose their level of participation for the year ahead. Four tiers are recognised, each with corresponding expectations.

Member	Annual check-in	Annual meeting	Quarterly meetings	Monthly meetings	Decision- making
Sleeping	✓				Strategic decisions via bridge person
Observer		✓			Strategic decisions via bridge person
Active		✓	✓	✓	Full participation
Caretaker		✓	✓	✓	Full + caretaker meetings

The Caretakers — elected annually — hold the stewardship role for the collective: coordinating logistics, holding the calendar, and ensuring continuity when the group's energy is dispersed. The role rotates so that the skills and responsibilities it develops are shared across the group over time.

Decision-making

Our decision-making is inspired by sociocratic principles. The aim is not to produce perfect agreement but to ensure everyone has a genuine say, and that the group can move without being paralysed by the need for unanimity.

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Publication and authorship

The Careoperative publishes collectively under the name O. Care — or, in more recent work, Dr. Care — as shared first author, with remaining authors listed alphabetically. The reasoning is described on the About page and in our published work. Here we set out the specific protocols that make this practice workable.

Conflict and repair

Disagreements, tensions, and conflicts are not aberrations in collective work — they are inevitable features of it. They reveal real differences. They are also, if handled well, opportunities for emotional learning and for building the kind of assertiveness and mutual understanding that sustains a long-running collaboration.

conflict practice

Prevention through structure

Much of our conflict prevention is structural rather than reactive. We developed a shared vision before we needed to make hard decisions. We established decision-making procedures and identified roles before disputes arose. We elected Caretakers with a mandate for continuity. We created regular processes — quarterly and annual reviews — for examining not just what we are producing but how we are working together.

We also actively worked to avoid competitive dynamics. The authorship model is one expression of this; so is the explicit commitment in our Code to celebrating collectively and creating space for the group to feel its underlying unity across visible differences.

conflict practice

Resolution protocol

When a conflict cannot be resolved through direct conversation, our protocol moves in steps: the parties involved are first supported separately, to create a secure space; then brought together, with the aim of clarifying perceptions, distinguishing positions from underlying interests and needs, and finding whatever partial agreements are available. Written or oral joint agreements are developed where useful.

We also maintain a committee of mediators — members of the collective not directly involved in a dispute — who can be called upon to facilitate this process. The goal is not to suppress conflict but to work through it in a way that leaves the relationship, and the collective, stronger.