Websites, video platforms, digital cooperation spaces

The stories behind the websites, video and contributive platforms, custom tools and digital cooperation spaces the agency has been building for twenty years. Accounts worth reading to understand how a digital tool actually takes shape, and to prepare your own.

Each article in this section tells the story of a web project we carried out: where the need came from, how the strategic and technical choices were made, with whom, through which stages, and what the tool has become in the daily life of the organisation that runs it. We share these accounts because the making of a digital tool usually remains invisible, even though the way a tool is built determines what it will make possible for years to come. A website designed in dialogue with the people who will bring it to life, and improved as usage develops, does not serve the same purposes as a website delivered ready-made and then left frozen.

You will read how Azimut, the platform for amateur artistic practices created with the MPAA in Paris, was built through ongoing consultation with the artists and the team, with a deliberate commitment to contribution and open source code; how collective writing platforms have served as the backbone of professional consultations and seminars; how video platforms allow organisations to host their own films, away from commercial platforms; or how the Pocket Films Festival website still archives today, more than fifteen years after the festival came to an end, the 350 films and hours of talks of this cinematic movement.

A few convictions run through these stories, put to the test project after project. A digital tool is a device serving a project, and it should therefore be designed with the people who will use it, editors, administrators, audiences, starting by listening to real needs rather than applying a ready-made model. It must be able to evolve, because needs evolve; this is why we develop with free software, mainly with SPIP, a content management system whose community has been active in France for over twenty-five years, with open and documented code that allows others to take over the work, and sovereign hosting, including for videos. Training the teams is part of the project itself, because a tool you are not autonomous with ends up constraining the very thing it was meant to serve.

This work covers online content strategy, website design and development, contributive and video platforms, custom professional tools, project consultancy and supervision, the building of digital heritage, and the training of editors, administrators and developers, all of which is now amplified by artificial intelligence.

You are welcome to read these stories as resources, and to draw from them methods, arguments for your governing bodies, and proven technical choices. And if a digital project is on your mind, the simplest way forward is to describe your situation to us; the first step is always a conversation.