Shortwave Collective is an international feminist group using the radio spectrum as artistic material. The collective began in 2020 as an online discussion and reading group from our homes dotted around the world. We work at a distance, across time zones, between or alongside our other commitments, connected through digital conversations and online meetings that often take place during the unsociable hours when our paths can align. When our collective meets, our faces and voices are transmitted to each other via Wi-Fi signals. They become data loaded onto radio waves that can travel vast distances. Our individual selves become collectively enmeshed in the electromagnetic realm.
In this text, we share some of the methods we have developed for working together, which are constantly evolving as we meet new hurdles with creative solutions that strengthen our togetherness.
Sharing Labour
Early on in our collective, we agreed on a rotating leadership structure. Each month, one member takes on a leadership role, organising the monthly meeting — polling members for dates, setting the agenda, chairing the meeting, and following up on actions or deadlines. We’ve come to call this role the ‘admin’. We also appoint a note taker, who records actions and agreements during the meeting and takes notes for anyone unable to attend.
As our collective has grown, we’ve developed shared responsibilities. We have a website, an email address, and social media channels, all of which require ongoing, collective care. We now also have an email monitor.
These three roles — admin, note taker, and email monitor — rotate every two months. Two months feels long enough to get into the swing of things, but not so long that anyone ‘owns’ the role or leads for too long. Rather than signing up, we use a spreadsheet to indicate turns, and we arrange swaps if we know we can’t fulfil a commitment at a particular time.
We have a collective agreement to share labour. When we all contribute an hour or two a month to administrative tasks, we’re able to keep up with our ideas and ambitions. These tasks might include website updates, application writing, tidying shared storage, or editing audio. At the start of each admin meeting we ask, ‘What did you bring?’, and share the gift of collective labour each of us has offered to the group.
Membership
At times, other aspects of life take over and we’re unable to take on collective admin, or to participate in meetings and projects. During these periods, we ‘go rainbow’. This means transitioning from an active member to an associate (‘rainbow’) member of the group. Rainbow members are on a temporary hiatus, even if that hiatus lasts for years.
Rainbows remain close to our ways of working by receiving email updates about activities and invitations to projects. In that way, it is easier for them to fold back to active mode or to contribute to specific projects if they like and have time. In the past, rainbow members have joined us for talks, performances, workshops and broadcasts that don’t require a heavy admin load.
The Summit
Sometimes we need to make structural decisions about how we work together — for example, whether we’re open to new members, or how labour is distributed across the group. If a decision can wait, or needs time and space for discussion, we put it on ice until our annual ‘summit’. This grand word is amusing given our scale, but the meeting itself is important to us. It gives us time to review how we work together and to reflect on our collective relationship. It feels healthy to have a dedicated yearly moment to take stock, resolve any tangles, and share visions for the year ahead.
We aim for unanimity in our decision-making, though sometimes we have to settle for asking, ‘Can we all live with this?’ The process can be slow, but it’s always worth it if we can reach a place of consensus.
Splitting Money
Sometimes we work together on unpaid projects, and sometimes on paid commissions. When there is money involved, we have a mechanism that helps us divide it between us. Initially, we thought we could each tally the hours spent on a project and then divide the budget accordingly. But quite apart from the difficulty of accounting for hours in creative work — where thinking, dreaming, testing, and researching are all part of the labour — we also work at different speeds. It quickly became clear that this approach was impractical, so we developed another system.
In our method, once a project is completed, we each self-allocate the role we feel we held within it:
Moon — overseeing that the team is completing agreed tasksCloud — overall presence across the projectLightning — strong moments of actionStone — background supportWave — waiving the fee
Each role is assigned a weighting:
Moon — 2.5Cloud — 2Lightning — 1Stone — 0.5Wave — 0
We use a spreadsheet to calculate the split. Once the project budget and our self-allocated roles are entered, it automatically shows how much each of us receives.
Collective Writing
We enjoy writing together, though it is necessarily slow. We begin on a Miro board using sticky notes: the first person writes a paragraph or more on the top note, and the next person adds their paragraph(s) on the note below. We continue in this way, building the text vertically. Alongside these paragraph notes is a second column, where we add references as we go, making it easier to collate the bibliography at the end. A third column is used for comments from one member to another on specific paragraphs. Sometimes these comments become tangents — evolving into footnotes or new paragraphs developed collectively.
When we’ve gone as far as we can (or, more often, when it’s a week before the deadline), we transfer the paragraphs and comments into a shared text document and begin a collective edit. We edit using suggested changes. If two members indicate agreement with a suggestion, it is actioned. The introduction and conclusion are written in this mode too, discussed through long comment threads until our ideas align.
This is a time-consuming process. It involves many readings, many edits, and usually some confusion. But the results are deeply satisfying, as we reflect on how many voices, knowledges, and ways of writing come together. Our tone is uneven throughout — something we value. We explain that the text is co-authored, and hope the reader senses this plurality while reading. At times, we foreground our distinct voices by peppering the text with anecdotes from individual experience, bringing embodied knowledge into dialogue with collective ideas.
Collective writing is our way of sharing understandings, curiosities, frustrations, and observations as they emerge from our shared practice. Through it, we often deepen and unravel the larger questions and intricacies of our engagement with radio waves, as they propagate beneath the surfaces of our ephemerally situated listening and making experiences.
Authorship
Sometimes one or two of us take the lead on a project — this might be a piece of writing, an audio edit, or a creative or administrative task. When we do, we take this on in service of the collective: collating ideas developed together and checking back with the group as much as is practicable. For this reason, our work is always collectively authored. In recognition of this, our outputs are attributed to Shortwave Collective rather than to any of us as a named lead.
We resist academic pressures to designate a lead author or principal investigator. This occasionally leads to amusing outcomes, such as peer-reviewed journals listing us as Dr. S. Collective, unable to resist turning us into an individual or individuals with a hierarchy.
Our individual names appear in a short biography. We list names alphabetically by first name, rather than by (often male-line) surnames. We name active members who contributed directly to the project’s thinking first, and, when possible, include our rainbow members second, acknowledging that their earlier contributions helped bring us to the point from which new work could emerge.