For twenty-five years, the agency has been building web platforms and digital tools designed as instruments of cooperation. We are opening a new line of work that extends this history: developing digital tools in the service of cultural democracy, and designing them with the organisations that will use them. Here we present where this work comes from, what is in service today, and how to take part.
Digital technology is never neutral
A digital tool carries a conception of the relationships between people. Who can write, who can read, what is kept, what disappears, who owns the data: each of these technical choices shapes the democratic life of the group using the tool. Benoît Labourdette develops this analysis in Cultural Rights and Digital Technology, which proposes putting the eight rights of the Fribourg Declaration into digital practice, and extends it in his writings on digital sovereignty (Digital sovereignty, a democratic emergency; Sovereign Digital, a Micropolitical Choice).
Most of the contribution tools used in the cultural sector today (collaborative walls, forms, online polls) are commercial services. Contributions are hosted outside Europe, difficult to export, and organisations lose access to them when the subscription ends: entire participatory processes vanish without leaving a trace. We make the opposite choices: free and open-source software, sovereign hosting, fully exportable data, and content that remains accessible years after the process has ended.
Tools in service
A few examples of tools of this kind, each one for a real need, that we design, develop and run:
- the « Azimut » platform for amateur artistic practices, launched in February 2025 with the MPAA and in active development: amateur artists make themselves visible there, meet one another and share resources, by themselves and across autonomous practices, a direct enactment of cultural democracy;
- « By my window » (2020), a participatory video creation platform opened during the lockdown, whose films remain online;
- the video platform “La fabrique numérique” in Les Lilas (Seine-Saint-Denis), which gathers the videos made by residents in the creative workshops offered by the town (read the story of this long-term collaboration);
- the « Media College » platform (2022) for Périfééries 2028, Saint-Denis’s bid for the title of European Capital of Culture, which collects contributions from the territory’s stakeholders (read the analysis of this experience);
- the giant digital brainstorming (2022), an idea-gathering format for large groups;
- the digital workshops run with Cultures du Cœur (listen to the podcast), where each participant has a permanent page gathering their creations;
- the contributory writing platform of the collaborative assessment of screen literacy education in Nouvelle-Aquitaine (ALCA, 2025-2026), which supports four months of collective work leading to a joint publication in eight chapters;
- the contribution platform of the living museography of the Silo (Le Mérévillois, Essonne), where residents, artists and institutions write during and between the public sessions, to invent the form that will make it possible to share the experience of the place (read the story : « Enlarging the Silo »).
This work is tied to a sustained practice of cultural rights: the « Cultural rights » creative writing seminar, photographic creation workshops within Réseau culture 21’s Paideia process, taking part in the seminar « What pedagogy by and for cultural rights ? ». The article Analyze your project using the Fribourg Declaration presents a method we use in training and consultancy.
Cultural democracy, augmented by digital technology
In these systems, we are experimenting with a practical enactment of cultural democracy, augmented by digital technology. Many organisations that want participation to thrive, in the cultural field and beyond, operate top-down, and their members’ ideas struggle to find a place there (The political dimension of organisational frameworks). We do the opposite: everyone contributes when they can, in disorder and spontaneity, and artificial intelligence produces syntheses of these contributions at a speed that changes the nature of the exercise. There is no longer any need to format people’s words in advance in order to process them; this freedom gives openness and legitimacy to the most diverse contributions, which are the richest. This is the shift that cultural rights describe: moving from cultural democratisation, which disseminates one culture to as many people as possible, to cultural democracy, where each person is recognised as a bearer and creator of culture (Democratisation or cultural democracy : what these two words do to theatre).
This experience holds true beyond the cultural sector. We want to put it at the service of experimental participatory democracy processes: consultations that lead to real productions, programmes of action shaped by the people who will carry them out, horizontal dynamics established over time.
A new line of work
We want to give the cultural sector contribution tools that belong to it. Concretely: permanent contribution walls, with managed access and full exports; platforms for editorialised collective writing; memory spaces for participatory processes; consultation systems across a territory. AI-assisted development, which we practise daily (To Code or Not to Code ?), allows us to build these tools within timeframes and at costs within the reach of cultural organisations, networks and local authorities.
Two projects are under way so far, the sovereign contribution wall and the Fribourg Declaration analysis tool; others will follow. We describe each of them in a dedicated page, written in the present tense and updated as the work progresses: you will find them just after this article.
Building these tools together
We want to design these tools with the people who will use them. We organise collective intelligence meetings by videoconference, open to networks, local authorities, cultural venues and social organisations, to identify needs, examine existing tools and outline together the ones that are missing. What is produced there is published and shared with the participants, in keeping with the criterion that guides all our collective intelligence work: what has been produced must continue to serve.
If you would like to take part in these meetings, or if your organisation needs a tool of this kind, write to us.
