Facilitating community innovation: The Outils-Réseaux Way

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the work of Outils-Réseaux,  a French group whose mission is to encourage the development and use of collaborative tools by associative movements. We focus in particular on a recent experiment among a group of citizens in Brest, France. Drawing on interviews and an analysis of the content of the project’s Wiki pages, we reflect on the how a training program for group facilitators participates in community innovation, where the community itself is an essential element of the innovation. We explore the coevolution of both technical infrastructure (tools for collaboration) and the community, and show how Outils-Réseaux mediates between the (social) world of users and the technical world of software developers.