Strategy, design and technical implementation of the “Azimut” platform

I am supporting and leading, on behalf of the MPAA, in its current phase, the strategy, design, and technical implementation of this platform, using a unique method tailored to the project’s challenges. This has been an eminently collective effort within the team and with the artists, the primary stakeholders, reflecting a strong commitment by the MPAA: to develop a sustainable, evolving, open, and collaborative tool, using a highly open methodology.

The Maison des Pratiques Artistiques Amateurs (MPAA, Paris) is the only institution in France and Europe entirely dedicated to amateur artistic practices across all sectors of the performing arts. It fosters a dynamic of support for amateur artists by providing workspaces and performance venues for groups, offering workshops and projects, providing guidance, and more recently, creating a collaborative online resource space: the platform www.ici-azimut.fr.

Azimut allows artists, currently mainly in Paris and the surrounding region, to find useful resources for their creative activities, exchange via a forum on both practical needs and deeper topics, create and edit their own group profiles in a directory, share their news in an events calendar to communicate, and find resources from professional structures that can host them in the directory.

The need for networking has been strongly expressed by the people we met. Azimut addresses three clearly articulated needs: being recognized (visibility), networking (connecting with others), and exchanging (resources, tips, mutual support...). This platform is here to contribute to respecting, encouraging, and legitimizing artistic practices, in line with cultural rights.

Azimut was officially launched in early February 2025.

Azimut can, we hope, be directly useful to you, and perhaps you may find value in sharing it with your network, partners, colleagues, or audiences. I invite you to explore it and am open to feedback.

A Story of a Bold Digital Project, Rooted in Cultural Rights Values

Even though Azimut is now in its early stages of public existence, it seems interesting to share a brief account of its creation, as we employed an atypical method in the field of digital project development—one that we believe is constructive and sustainable, open to potential evolutions, and as aligned as possible with cultural rights principles.

I worked on the development of Azimut at the request of the MPAA, hand in hand with Sonia Leplat, General Director, and Éric Seigneur, Head of Information. This ambitious project has a rich, non-linear history, which is intrinsic to any structuring dynamic. The establishment of a resource center for amateur artists has been part of the MPAA’s institutional project since Sonia Leplat took office in 2017. From the outset, a collaborative dynamic was desired, though not concretely implemented in the first version of Azimut. I was then approached in the fall of 2023 to completely redesign Azimut as a tool that could be fully appropriated by its users.

The initial stages of my work were both strategic and technical. Strategically, we organized consultations with amateur artists to identify their needs and desires, based on the existing site, and determine how this type of platform could address them. In parallel, we conducted technical studies to determine the best path for evolving the tool to enable contributions.

In any digital project, there are multiple approaches and ways to build. The choice of methodology must be deliberate, as it strongly impacts the nature of the project itself. The primary goal for Azimut was to be a sustainable and extensible tool, as collaborative and open as possible, capable of accommodating artists’ contributions and responding to their evolving needs.

We decided to quickly release a first version of the redesigned site so that artists could start using it as soon as possible, allowing us to improve it based on usage, following an agile methodology. This required a method and technique that allowed for gradual scaling.

After much deliberation, questioning, reflection, and consultation, it became clear that development would be based on a free and collaborative software widely used in France for 25 years to create websites: SPIP, which has a very open community of developers. This would allow the platform to evolve without being dependent on a specific provider. We also ultimately decided that I would oversee the technical development directly with my agency, ensuring that we were not in a position of a technical provider on which the MPAA would become dependent, but rather in a fully open approach to the source code, technical information, and documentation—both within the code itself and through videos, texts, podcasts, and regular meetings around the site’s construction. These resources and internal documentation are integral to the site and accessible to administrators, enabling others to appropriate it openly, which has already happened twice.

During the first phase of development, which lasted from February to June 2024, we organized regular consultations with Azimut users, as well as presentations and training sessions for the MPAA team. This new tool needed to integrate into daily work, and it was much better to do so gradually during its construction. By gathering feedback along the way, the platform could be built in a coherent and appropriate manner.

My role was to animate this community in partnership with the team, particularly Sonia Leplat and Éric Seigneur. For very specific developments of collaborative functions, we enlisted Anne-Lise Martenot, a full-stack developer, who implemented features like registration, group creation, etc. The technical system we built with SPIP was open in its design, allowing her to contribute to its growth.

The chosen logic for technical development is modular. This means that when developing a new feature, we ensure it integrates into the overall ecosystem to benefit from SPIP’s progressive updates. We are always thinking about enabling future evolutions of this technical object. Moreover, SPIP is exceptional because it includes its own development language, allowing for sophisticated yet accessible feature creation.

The first redesign of Azimut was released on June 7, 2024, and amateur artists began to adopt it. Its initial web design was very minimal, based on the Bootstrap CSS framework. We decided to let the system live and verify its proper functioning and user adoption before moving to the next phase: feature evolutions and the graphic design aligned with the original charter.

To implement this design, respecting the initial charter, we decided to work with a graphic designer, Martha Dro, herself an amateur artist who uses MPAA services for the performances she participates in. She was ideally positioned to understand artists’ needs, being one herself. Since SPIP’s source code is easy to understand and developed with this in mind, the designer can directly intervene in the code to progressively evolve and improve the site’s web design. This is still ongoing!

Finally, the site is hosted in France by O2Switch, with a dual setup (development server + production server), and all administrative and technical server management keys belong to the MPAA, ensuring full sovereignty over its tool.

Our approach is demanding—it is not a traditional “specifications / provider” model, as we invented a method tailored to the project’s values, goals, and specific needs. The MPAA chose and took the risk of embracing methodological innovation, and we went through phases of questioning that were sometimes destabilizing but ultimately very constructive, directly involving beneficiaries at the heart of the project.

Azimut platform

https://www.ici-azimut.fr/