During the presentation day of the national project for the future of audiovisual media in libraries, on 6 July 2026 at the BnF, I facilitated a workshop to write an advocacy document aimed at elected officials. Here I describe what this collective text contains and why it has political significance, then the method that made it possible to get there in two hours.
From a request by elected officials to a writing workshop
The national project for the future of audiovisual media in public libraries, led by the Ministry of Culture with Images en Bibliothèques and the CNC, ended with a presentation day on 6 July 2026 at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The afternoon was devoted to workshops whose subjects had been co-designed beforehand. The one I facilitated proposed writing together the first version of an advocacy document on the role of libraries for audiovisual media, aimed at elected officials.
The idea had been born in the political hearings I had conducted in June with Pascale Issartel, which I describe in another article. The associations of elected officials had voiced a clear request there: “Help us understand what libraries have become, what happens there, what is at stake there, so that we can defend them.” In a context of tightly constrained budgets, where shared competences such as culture are the first to find themselves “in a delicate position”, in their own words, elected officials need tools to grasp the meaning of these institutions, their full democratic dimension, and therefore the point of supporting and funding them. An advocacy document, in this spirit, is not a militant text, it is a document made to be useful to those who decide.
A letter that begins with “Monsieur le maire”
A dozen people chose to devote their afternoon to this work. We had two hours, then three minutes to report back to all the participants of the day. In two hours, the group produced some ten texts, first drafts of the different parts of an advocacy document, and among them a letter that begins with “Monsieur le maire”.
A few strong lines emerged from it: the Robert law of 2021, which names audiovisual media among libraries’ collections; the vitality of physical media, with 3,000 video releases a year in France, a physical market of 170 million euros against 70 for pay-per-view video on demand, and 18-to-25-year-olds leading Blu-ray purchases; the fact that for certain auteur films, media libraries’ acquisitions account for 30 to 50% of the pressed volume, so that by buying films, the library supports creation; the young audience, the video librarians’ role as trusted guides, collections as a rampart of diversity against the shifting catalogues of the platforms, complementarity with the other places of the territory, image education as a matter of citizenship.
I know libraries well and run many cultural activities in them, and yet I learned things I did not suspect. I did not think physical media counted so much in mediation, to the point that covers are reprinted even for dematerialised films, because recommendation and connection pass through objects you can hold and show. Nor did I think the question of diversity was so directly linked to that of preservation, because without preserved media, we depend on platforms where works can disappear overnight. I changed my mind by listening.
Giving ourselves the right to dream
When launching the workshop, I had told the participants two things. On the one hand, describe and explain what exists, because elected officials first ask to understand what is really being done. On the other, give ourselves the right to dream, because a political project is a project for the next ten years, and a public policy is not built in response to the problems of the present alone. The political choice to support something is always a choice turned towards the future.
This text has a particular value because it comes from professionals, each writing from their own place and their own territory. The participants gave a name, moreover, to what they found in it: talking points, that is, arguments and ways of putting things, usable by each of them in their everyday dialogue with their own elected officials. At the end of the report-back, I publicly asked the authors whether they agreed that everyone could take up their arguments, each in their own context, and they did. This is the dimension of sharing, which in my view gives the text its reach, since each person appropriates tools instead of receiving a plan designed in their place.
The way this text was written cannot be separated from what it says. An advocacy document that speaks of cultural democracy but had been produced by a top-down method would contradict itself. It is this link between method and content that I would now like to set out in detail.
Sheets of paper laid on the floor
I had brought a short-throw video projector and a computer. We had to find a white wall in the space, and we found one, a little apart from the other workshops. I took the time to set up a very large image, so that people would be immersed in what we were going to build together, and I arranged the chairs in an open arc, with no table in the middle, myself at one end with a table, the computer and a camera.
Once the chairs were in place, I felt something was missing, and I laid on the floor, in front of each chair, a small pile of sheets of paper with a pen on top. It may seem trivial, but it makes people want to join in. People walking past the setup before the workshop began wanted to come and take part. You don’t know what will happen there, but you can see there will be a collective, since the chairs form an open arc, and that there will be creation, since blank sheets and pens await each person, the whole legitimised by a large screen. The camera on the table was filming the felt-tip pens stored underneath, in an organised disorder, and this image appeared at one edge of the big screen, so that the idea of a creation in progress was present before anyone had written a word. The purpose of a workshop is to set a frame in which each person can bring the best of themselves, and the scenography is fully part of that.
The suitcase with five dictaphones
In my suitcase there were paper and pens, but also felt-tips, a second computer, five dictaphones, gaffer tape, extension leads, power strips, chargers, USB cables. I always have more equipment than what I have planned to do requires. It is not a whole truckload, it is a few extra objects I don’t know exactly what I will do with, but which allow me to give myself permission to step outside my initial frame. If every object you bring is assigned to one precise task, you don’t even give yourself permission to imagine anything else. The paper and pens, I didn’t know whether I would use them; people have pens. But it is because I had them that, seeing the chairs and the screen, I could sense that they should be laid on the floor. Of course, we were at the Bibliothèque nationale de France; I could have asked someone to find me paper. But I need to be quick, and it is better to have some paper in the suitcase.
A QR code made that morning, during the presentations
It always seems important to me that what people create should belong to them, and that they should have immediate access to it, without my appropriating it. For this I use a kind of shared drive, accessible via a QR code, with no login at all. You scan it with your phone and you reach your items directly; you can edit them. I had not planned it for this workshop, although it is part of my practice. That very morning, while I was listening to the working groups’ presentations, I created the space, the link and the QR code, telling myself that we would deposit there, as we went along, whatever people wrote.
A structure that can always be changed again
We began with a twenty-minute brainstorm, during which I noted what was being said in a mind map projected on the big screen. People saw their ideas appear as they voiced them. A first debate, which I launched myself, concerned the title: should this be called an advocacy document, or a guide, and which would be most useful to elected officials? Then the contributions multiplied, and at one point, because I am the guarantor that there will be a result in the end, I began to propose in the mind map a document structure, parts and sub-parts, which we discussed together.
Thanks to the mind map, everything can be changed at any time; you are prisoner of no formalism. There is a permanent slight blur, and at the same time something reassuring, because what is written on the screen is structured, and that structure can move. If the formalism is rigid, cooperation cannot be welcomed in. The mind map done collectively puts cooperation into action, structuring the group’s ideas without ever freezing that structure. You need one person to facilitate, but it is not a person who takes power through a fixed protocol, it is a person who is there so that things take shape from what comes from the group.
After about fifty minutes, I proposed that people position themselves on the themes. It took about ten minutes, and that time is necessary. We often want this step to go quickly, because we are afraid of wasting time and want to move on. I think the opposite. This is when people project themselves and prepare for what they are going to write, feeling free in their choice, and this path is necessary to them because they are human beings. While discussing who would take which theme, several people asked, moreover, to change the structure of the document a little again, and that was possible, since nothing was fixed. Pairs formed. The aim was to produce something useful, not to respect formalism for formalism’s sake.
The moment I gave up photographing the sheets
Then each person wrote, for twenty-five minutes, alone or in a small group. It was very beautiful, this community of people writing in parallel, each knowing exactly what they had to do and being responsible for it, each with their full place and full freedom of contribution.
My initial idea was to photograph the handwritten sheets with the camera to digitise them, then retype the texts later. When I received the first finished text, the letter to the mayor as it happened, I realised that photos of manuscripts would be hard to work with, and that with the number of texts on the way, nobody could easily go back to them. So, since this person was ahead, I suggested she read her text aloud and record it on a dictaphone. I have built fast transcription tools for my work, and I decided to use them. With her, I made a first attempt: recording of the reading, transcription, upload to the drive, and the result was an editable text that the person could correct herself by scanning the QR code. At that moment I decided to do the same for everyone.
I took out my second computer, both connected to the same drive. On one, projected on the screen, the texts appeared as they came in, and people could come and enter their email address to receive the link. On the other, I collected the audio files, renamed them with the name of each theme, noting the order on a sheet of paper, and sent them one by one for transcription. I placed myself in front of each person with the dictaphone, one recording per person. Some people had made lists and added elements as they read; others read their text as written, beginning with the title of their part.
From this improvisation was born a moment I had not planned, in which each person read their text in front of the others, and we listened to one another. The written became oral. It is striking, because it draws a dialectic between the initial orality of the brainstorm, which had structured the collective frame, and this final orality, which was the content each person produced thanks to that frame. The collective frame allows each person to express fully what they have to bring, and that contribution then returns to the collective. It is a method of cooperation in itself.
One person had left before recording her text, and she came back towards the end. I clipped the dictaphone to her shirt and she recorded herself on her own. Then I invited everyone to correct their own text, which most did, if only to remove the transcription of the words exchanged just before each reading. Five minutes before the end of the two hours, everything was transcribed and visible on the screen.
That same evening, a six-page first draft
During the three minutes of report-back before all the participants, I showed the QR code and invited the room to scan it. Almost everyone took out their phone. The arguments and the ways of putting things were thus made available to everyone straight away.
Back home at the end of the afternoon, I asked an artificial intelligence to take up all the texts and produce a first draft from them, without leaving out any idea. The result is a six-page advocacy document, together with a one-page summary, in which the arguments are set side by side and complete one another. It is only a first draft, but a first draft that is already structured and workable. I put the documents online in Word, PDF and Markdown, and sent an email to the participants who had left their address, with the day’s organising team in copy. Those who had scanned the QR code during the report-back found there, that same evening, this first shaping of all these ideas born in a single afternoon.
The common sheet that could not fit
The other workshops of the afternoon were run according to a common method, with the same formatted sheet for reporting back. That sheet had in fact been prepared for me too, but it did not correspond to what we were going to do. I do not say this to criticise anyone. The exchanges in those workshops were rich, people learned from one another, and that is a construction in itself. But on the side of traces, what remains is sheets filled in summarily, post-its handed in by some people, and a three-minute oral report per group. There is no collective written trace, because nothing in the method had provided for one, and the syntheses would demand enormous work that, given the available resources, in all likelihood nobody will do. That is a pity, because there was a great deal of intelligence in the room, and this richness is reduced by a method identical for every subject.
In the report-backs, another feature struck me: an imaginary of efficiency and centralised power. We will put this in place next month, that in three months, an assessment in a year, a bill after that. We believe this is concrete, but these are intentions, and they must be regarded as such. And above all, in spirit, it is thinking in other people’s place, top-down, as if a few people were deciding for everyone else. Cultural democracy is the opposite of that.
A method of course has invariants, such as the fact that each person can express themselves and is made aware of their contribution. But it must also be specific to what is being built; it cannot be the same for every subject, and it must be supple. If the workshop produced in two hours a tool that some will perhaps use in their professional context to better defend their work with their elected officials, it is because nothing went as planned and because I agreed to change the method along the way. I had planned photographs of manuscripts; I improvised readings and transcriptions. If I had clung to what I had planned, collective intelligence would not have produced as much. That is the whole nuance, in the field of cultural rights, between participation and cooperation. At the start, people take part in a project designed by someone; along the way, cooperation gets going, governance changes, and the project becomes larger than the one that had been designed. This requires, from the person who facilitates and who remains the guarantor that things come to a good end, accepting that the project itself should evolve. The advocacy document of 6 July 2026 is a first draft, and anyone can take it up. That was the point.
