We support cultural organisations in building their own working tools: a shared database of qualified contacts, a tracking system for projects and partner organisations, a management tool for an event or a festival. The tool is designed with the team from its real data, developed in free and open-source software with the help of artificial intelligences, hosted on your premises, and the team is trained to make it evolve on its own. The criterion that has guided this work for twenty years: what has been built must go on serving once the support has ended.
Your situation
Your organisation runs on tools that do render service, but that have piled up without an overall plan: multiplying spreadsheets, files travelling by email, standard software of which you use only a part and which imposes its own logic on you, sometimes a service provider to whom the specifics of your work must be explained again at every change, and who charges for every change. The data exists, but it is scattered between people and departments; when someone leaves the organisation, they take with them what they alone knew. Nobody on the team can tell with precision, figures and documents in hand, everything that successive teams have accomplished in the place over the years, with whom, for whom.
A professional habit makes this situation worse: in the cultural sector, working tools are held to be a matter for technicians, a subordinate question to be delegated. Our observation, tested in the field, is the opposite one: working on one’s tools is part of the work itself. Benoît Labourdette founded and directed the Pocket Films Festival; the festival was able to carry its ambition because its professional tool, built for it, grew with it for six years. A tool conceived from within the work broadens what teams can undertake.
What you obtain
- A tool exactly fitted to your activity and its vocabulary, built from your real data and your real uses, observed with you.
- A database shared by the whole team, accessible from computers and phones, including remotely and securely, with a history of actions and a fine-grained qualification of contacts, in compliance with the GDPR.
- Sovereign and frugal hosting: your data stays with you, on a simple file server (NAS) or a small server, with no platform subscription and no dependence on a software vendor.
- Data structured in open, documented formats, which will remain readable and reusable in ten years, in twenty years, whatever the software of that time. It is also thanks to this structuring that the team will one day be able to tell the story of the place.
- A trained team, able to make the tool evolve on its own as use unfolds, without anyone becoming a computer specialist.
- Working time made available again for the missions that matter.
How we work
We begin by mapping the data with the team, in prepared meetings where everyone has the floor: what information circulates, between whom, in what forms, with what gaps and what duplicates. This mapping is already a piece of collective intelligence work on the profession itself; this is how, in Les Lilas, with the cultural affairs department, we drew the map of the data before building anything, and discovered along the way a considerable amount of working time lost for want of shared data.
Then comes progressive development, in free and open-source software, carried out with the help of artificial intelligences. This is the decisive change of recent years: the agile method, which consists in building in small steps and testing each step in use, can now be put into practice by the teams themselves, with the AI taking on the writing of the code. Where one previously had to rely on a software vendor, and remain dependent on it, one now builds a fully free tool, which one understands and owns. We train the team in situation, on its own data: what a server is, where the software lives, how to ask the AI for a change and how to check it. The team’s autonomy is the explicit goal of the support.
We have been practising this approach for twenty years, making it evolve with the available techniques. The professional tools we supported fifteen years ago at Cinémas 93 or at Périphérie are still in service today [récits à venir : art2098 et art2097 en préparation]; the databases built with the ACID team supported the association’s internal operations and the durability of its contents; in 2020, we supported the production company Drôle de Trame in setting up its shared file server. More recently, Benoît Labourdette supported the visual artist Virginie Houdet in taking back control of her own website with the help of artificial intelligences, until she could make it evolve on her own. Artificial intelligences radically lower the threshold of access to this long-standing principle: what used to require a developer now requires a method, a framework, and someone to accompany the first steps.
We test this approach on ourselves: the agency tracks its contacts, its projects and its partner organisations with a tool built in this way, hosted on a simple NAS and accessible remotely and securely.
References
- Experimenting together to become autonomous : seven years with the cultural affairs department of Les Lilas: mapping the data, building two professional tools with the teams, appropriation training, autonomy.
- www.lacid.org website + Databases: operational databases (films, selections, contacts, newsletter) built with the team over a year and a half.
- www.festivalpocketfilms.fr website: taking back the festival’s website in-house, when the quotes requested from providers turned out to be too high.
Resources to go further:
