This paper is an expansion of the way we understand collaboration as a model for cultural production and media practices. According to scholarly work, collaboration is the basis for participating in the production of media content (Jenkins 2006), for egalitarian peer production (Benkler 2006), for sharing knowledge (Tapscott & Williams 2008), for collectively creating information and knowledge resources that are non-exclusive (digital commons), to the usage patterns of social networks to “prosuming” and "produsage” (Bruns 2008) and to the cultural consequences of the gifts economics of "sharing". While there is a plethora of literature and research on these particular practices, there is a shortage of analysis on collaboration itself, its roots and the reason for its success.

Here, collaboration is analysed from a socio-technical perspective of practices rather than from a classic media perspectives. While digital media have become prevalent, the emerged practices cannot be explained with media specifics (Fuchs 2014) in a reference to the computer or the Internet. I argue that collaboration is deeply rooted in the development of computer technologies like Vannevar Bush’s (1944) Memex and hacker culture (open source developers, free software producers). Collaboration carried a libertarian notion that included freedom of knowledge, transparency, independency, openness and sharing as cultural models of creating value. In contrast, there are assessments of collaboration as a mode of control in the media industries (Born & Hesmondhalgh 2000; Jensen & Scacchi 2005). Interviews with open software developers, hackers and entrepreneurs at “Fosdem 2016”, Europe’s biggest conference and meeting for open and free software, show that practices like hacking, coding and programming differ from classic industry environments. Rather, these collaborative practices need to be understood as a craft that is improvised (Agre 1997, p.7). However, this improvisation must not be understood as random acting. It is rather a constant re-negotiation between necessary planning in order to work on complex projects and the curiosity and the crafting skills of hackers (Kelty 2008).