The PLACES project
Over the last 15 months, I have been busy with another project on a very different subject from this blog. I did not want to talk about it here as it was not directly related to my concerns for parliamentary infrastructure. Finally, now that it is over, I tell myself that it may have been a mistake. Many of my thoughts on this topic could have interested you as well.
This is the PLACES project, supported by OpenEdition Center and funded by the French Minister of Culture. Its aim was to experiment collaborative research between SSH researchers and journalists, especially at the time of the field survey and within the framework of three pilot projects. I was associated with it with my colleague Alexandra Caria, first to observe the actual implementation of these collaborations, and to identify their benefits, obstacles and dynamics. Then, I was asked to make recommendations for the creation of a digital platform to support this type of collaboration in the future.
The articulation work in interprofessional contexts
What does this have to do with my initial concerns? The connection was made through the concept of infrastructure. In my doctoral thesis, I devoted an entire chapter to explaining how the central issue of the National Assembly’s infrastructure is to succeed in connecting the professional activities of well-segmented categories of social actors: the deputies and their staff, the various categories of civil servants, even journalists, etc. This was, incidentally, the main challenge of its IT modernisation since the 2000s: optimising these interprofessional connections in order to make the parliamentary process more fluid and thus speed up legislative work.
In the PLACES project, I have looked again at this question of the articulation between distinct professional worlds in transversal activities. I similarly wondered what these interprofessional connections had to gain from being supported by digital tools. More broadly, this outside project enabled me to deepen my reflection on the socio-technical conditions necessary for social actors to work together, in line with the research carried out since the end of the 1990s on the issue of Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW).
Publication of the report
Anyway, the final report of this project, co-authored with Alexandra and entitled “Journalists and researchers on the field: A study of three interprofessional collaborations” is now freely available online in French (the English version is forthcoming). I warmly invite you to read it and circulate it around you.
If you have less time, you could also take a look at the different posts we have published on the PLACES blog (in French), in which you will find many reflections on citizen science, the RGPD framework, the articulation work specific to interprofessional collaborations, the functional recommendations for a dedicated platform, etc.
The PLACES project report, on the HAL archive plateform (the English version is forthcoming)
The PLACES project blog, sur the Hypotheses.org plateform
Have a good read!
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Jonathan Chibois (4 mars 2021). The PLACES project. LASPIC | Carnet. Consulté le 16 mars 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/qqnw