During the closing day of the national project on the future of audiovisual media in public libraries, on 6 July 2026 at the BnF, I facilitated a workshop devoted to writing an advocacy document addressed to elected officials. I recount here what this collective text contains and why it matters politically, then the method that made it possible to produce it in two hours.
From a request by elected officials to a writing workshop
The national project on the future of audiovisual media in public libraries, led by the French Ministry of Culture together with Images en Bibliothèques and the CNC, concluded with a closing day on 6 July 2026 at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The afternoon was devoted to workshops whose subjects had been co-constructed beforehand. The one I facilitated proposed to write together the first version of an advocacy document on the role of libraries for audiovisual media, addressed to elected officials.
The idea had grown out of the political hearings I had conducted in June with Pascale Issartel, which I recount in another article. In those hearings, the associations of elected officials had voiced a clear request: 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 severely constrained budgets, where shared responsibilities such as culture are, in their own words, the first to come under strain, elected officials need tools to grasp the meaning of these institutions, their full democratic dimension, and therefore the meaning of supporting and funding them. An advocacy document, in this spirit, is not a piece of activist writing; it is a document made to be useful to those who make the decisions.
A letter that begins with « Monsieur le maire »
A dozen people chose to devote their afternoon to this work. We had two hours, followed by a three-minute report to the whole assembly of the day. In two hours, the group produced around ten texts, first drafts of the various parts of an advocacy document, and among them a letter that begins with « Monsieur le maire », Dear Mayor.
What came out of it can be summed up in a few main lines: the French library law of 2021, known as the Robert law, which names audiovisual media among library collections; the vitality of physical media, with 3,000 video releases per year in France, a physical market of 170 million euros against 70 million for transactional video on demand, and 18- to 25-year-olds leading Blu-ray purchases; the fact that for certain art-house films, media library acquisitions account for 30 to 50% of the pressed copies, so that by buying films, libraries directly support creation; young audiences, the role of video librarians as trusted advisers, collections as a bulwark for diversity against the shifting catalogues of streaming platforms, the complementarity with the other cultural venues of a territory, and film and media literacy as a matter of citizenship.
I know libraries well and I run many cultural projects in them, yet I learned things I had not suspected. I did not think that physical media mattered so much in mediation, to the point that cover sleeves are reprinted even for dematerialised films, because recommendation and human connection pass through objects that can be held and shown. Nor did I think that the question of diversity was so directly tied to that of preservation, because without preserved media, we depend on platforms where works can disappear overnight. I changed my mind by listening.
A political project gives itself the right to dream
When launching the workshop, I had told the participants two things. On the one hand, to describe and explain what already exists, because elected officials first ask to understand what is actually being done. On the other hand, to give themselves the right to dream, because a political project is a project for the next ten years, and a public policy is not built solely in response to the problems of the present. The political choice to support something is always a choice turned towards the future.
This text has a particular value because it comes from the professionals themselves, each one writing from their own position and their own territory. The participants gave a name to what they found in it, talking points, that is to say arguments and ways of putting things, which each of them can use in their daily dialogues with their own elected officials. At the end of the report session, I publicly asked the authors whether they agreed that anyone could take up their arguments, each in their own context, and they did. We are here in the dimension of sharing, which in my view is what 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 describe 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, slightly set 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 that 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. Those who walked past the installation before the workshop began wanted to take part. You do not know what will happen there, but you can see that 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 thing given weight by a large screen. The camera on the table was filming the felt pens stored underneath it, in an organised disorder, and this image appeared on 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 audio recorders
In my suitcase there were paper and pens, but also felt pens, a second computer, five audio recorders, gaffer tape, extension leads, power strips, chargers, USB cables. I always carry more equipment than what I have planned to do. It is not a whole truckload, it is a little more than needed, things I do not 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 a precise task, you do not even allow yourself to think outside the frame. The paper and the pens, I did not 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 a little paper in the suitcase.
A QR code made that very morning, during the report sessions
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 through a QR code, with no login of any kind. You scan it with your phone and you reach your material directly, and you can edit it. I had not anticipated it for this workshop, even though it is part of my usual practice. That very morning, while I was listening to the reports of the working groups, 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 brainstorming session of about twenty minutes, during which I took notes in a mind map, projected on the big screen, as things were being said. People saw their ideas appear as they expressed them. A first debate, which I launched myself, concerned the title: should this be called an advocacy document, or a guide, and what would be most useful to elected officials? Then the contributions multiplied, and at some point, because I am the guarantor that there will be a result in the end, I began to propose within the mind map a structure for the document, parts and sub-parts, which we discussed together.
Thanks to the mind map, everything can be changed at any time, and no formalism holds you prisoner. There is a permanent slight blur, and at the same time something reassuring, because what is written on the screen is structured, and this structure can move. If the formalism is rigid, cooperation cannot be received. The collective mind map puts cooperation into practice, by structuring the group’s ideas without ever freezing that structure. A person is needed to facilitate, but not a person who takes power through a fixed protocol, rather a person who is there so that things take shape from what comes out of the group.
After about fifty minutes, I suggested that people position themselves on the themes. It took about ten minutes, and this time is necessary. One often wants this stage to go quickly, out of fear of losing time and eagerness 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 journey is necessary to them because they are human beings. While discussing who would take which theme, several people asked to change the structure of the document a little more, and it was possible, since nothing was fixed. Pairs formed. The aim was to produce something useful, not to respect a 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 one knowing exactly what they had to do and being responsible for it, each one with their full place and their full freedom of contribution.
My initial idea was to photograph the handwritten sheets with the camera in order to digitise them, then to retype the texts later. When I received the first finished text, the letter to the mayor as it happens, I realised that photographs of manuscripts would be difficult to work with, and that with the number of texts on the way, no one would easily be able to come back to them. So, since this person had finished early, I suggested that she read her text aloud and record it with an audio recorder. I have built fast transcription tools for my own work, and I decided to put them to use. With her, I made a first trial, recording of the reading, transcription, upload to the drive, and the result was an editable text, which she 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 being 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 to transcription. I placed myself in front of each person with the recorder, one recording per person. Some had made lists and added elements as they read, others read literally, starting with the title of their part.
From this improvisation came a moment I had not foreseen, in which each person read their text aloud to the others, and we listened to one another. Writing became orality. It is striking, because it draws a dialectic between the initial orality of the brainstorming, which had structured the collective frame, and this final orality, which was the content each person had produced thanks to that frame. The collective frame allows each person to express fully what they have to bring, and this contribution then returns to the collective. It is a method of cooperation in itself.
One person had left before recording her text, and came back towards the end. I clipped the recorder onto 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 to the whole assembly of the day, 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, 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 alongside one another and complement each other. 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 organising team of the day in copy. Those who had scanned the QR code during the report session found there, that same evening, this first draft of all the ideas born in one afternoon.
The common sheet that could not fit
The other workshops of the afternoon were run according to a common method, with the same pre-formatted sheet for the report. 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 the people involved. The exchanges in those workshops were rich, people learned from one another, and that is a construction in itself. But as far as traces are concerned, what remains is sheets filled in summarily, post-it notes handed in by some, 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 require an enormous amount of work that, given the available means, in all likelihood no one will do. It is a pity, because there were many intelligences present, and this richness is diminished by a method identical for all subjects.
In the reports, another feature struck me, an imaginary of efficiency and of centralised power. We will put this in place next month, that in three months, an assessment in a year, a bill in Parliament after that. One believes this to be concrete, but these are intentions, and they should be considered as such. And above all, in spirit, this is thinking in other people’s place, in a top-down way, as if a few people were deciding for everyone else. Cultural democracy is the opposite of that.
A method has invariants, of course, such as the fact that each person should be able to express themselves and be made aware of their contribution. But it must also be singular to what is being built, it cannot be the same for all subjects, and it must be flexible. If the workshop produced in two hours a tool that some may use in their professional context to better defend their work before their elected officials, it is because nothing went as planned and the method accepted to change along the way. I had planned photographs of manuscripts, I improvised readings and transcriptions. Had I clung to what I had planned, collective intelligence would not have produced as much. This 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 sets in, governance changes, and the project becomes larger than the one that had been designed. This requires, from the person who facilitates and remains the guarantor that things are seen through, a capacity for the project itself to evolve. The advocacy document of 6 July 2026 is a first draft, and anyone can take it up. That was the point.
