University of NamurPériclès: A Global IT Project for Namur
University of NamurPlease note: All materials here are copyright SLIM and their authors 1997. No citation or quotation of these materials may be made without written permission of the authors.
While doing interviews in order to make a case study, a researcher always has some ideas of an ideal project, of what is a success and what is a failure, in function of his criteria. This has been the case in this study and one has to wonder what are these specific criteria and if they are relevant. In fact, the criteria used here correspond to the objectives of the SLIM research for the Public Sector study, as proposed by Namur in a previous document and underlined by Edinburgh in the Craigmillar case study, that's to say:
One has to be very conscious that if the research point of view is a technological one or if we take the perspective of an industrial policy, things can be analysed in a completely different way. So, qualifying a story as a success or a failure is always subjective, depending on the criteria used. This has to be borne in mind before reading this case study.
As the reader will discover in the following text, Périclès is a complex case study with a lot of problems arising and at the present time, it arrives at a crucial step where decisions are to be made about its future. This case study might be of some help in this process as it could become the basis of further discussions. Then, in order to deal tactfully with the susceptibilities and not to increase the existing mistrust, the words of the people interviewed will be as anonymous as possible.
The information proposed below come from nine interviews, from already knew information and from our personal analysis.
Before beginning this case study, it is worth underlining the problem of the extent of the definitions. In this Public Sector Integrated Study, we decide to analyse local authorities multimedia project devoted to citizens, i.e. mostly virtual cities. But this concept is not clearly defined and, as underlined by Marc van Lieshout (e-mail of 11/11/97), "the meaning of the concept has changed since its beginning". Moreover, "it means different things to different actors". Besides, a lot of similar concepts are used in the literature: digital cities, electronic cities, virtual communities, ... Even the term 'communities' is not clearly defined, as shown by the case on Craigmillar Community Information Service developed by the Edinburgh team. Marc van Lieshout in the same e-mail (11/11/97) raised also the problem of the concept of 'user' of the digital city.
This imprecision will then make the comparison difficult and in the present case, it makes it difficult to really know what we are talking about since Périclès is a complex project, a global project including three different applications, as will be explained by the description of the project.
In the last version of the methodology (September 8th 1997), we have defined some categories in order to structure the case study. When trying to apply them at the Périclès case, it seems that some of them are not that relevant. The proposed structure will then be adapted in function of the information available.
For some years, Information and Communication Technologies are said to be important for the economy of Namur and its region. In fact, Namur is a medium city (115.000 inhabitants) mostly dominated by service industries and ICT seem important, if not indispensable, to improve the economic activity and dynamism of the region. Different initiatives and studies were taken in this direction since 1991: an analysis of the influence of telecommunications on the image of the region(1), the set up of a "Commissariat aux technologies de l'information", the launch of the "Programme Lauréat" to support innovative people and initiatives, especially in the field of ICT, ...
In October 1994, the BEPN, Bureau Economique de la Province de Namur, a provincial institution for the economic development of the local enterprises, asked for specific ICT guidelines to a local firm, CIGER, specialised in automation projects in public administrations of several municipalities, mainly in the Namur Province. CIGER proposed to François Bodart, professor at the University of Namur and member of the management board of CIGER to do this job. His report(2) is the first step of the Périclès initiative.
Périclès, Program for Extending Resources in Information and Communication by a Local Exchange System, defined as a user-friendly Intranet for citizens and SMEs, is characterised by a high complexity and a multiplicity of actors. Before presenting the different actors (see below), it is worth explaining in details the structure of the project.
Périclès has the main objective of developing innovative telematics applications for administrations and firms and to help the Province of Namur to become a centre of excellence in ICT(3). In this respect, three applications are developed for the three main categories of actors/users of the region:
These three applications are included in the global Périclès project in order to reach economies of scale and to allow the commercialisation of the generic technological solutions that will be developed in the project.
In this case study, except if necessary or relevant, we will focus on the citizens application as this is more linked to the concept of virtual cities, even if SMEs and administrations are part of the city, but these are very particular applications.
Before describing the rest of the project, let us mention the reference to Périclès, which has been an important Athenian person (before Jesus Christ), chief of the democrat party and attached to the democratisation of the public and political spheres. This reference to Périclès project reinforces the announced objective of increasing local democracy, an objective often presented in many virtual cities projects.
As mentioned above, there are a lot of actors in this project but this was said to be necessary by the conceiver of the project in order to get the main economic and institutional actors of the city involved.
Prof. François Bodart has a central role in the project. François Bodart is professor at the University of Namur where he founded the Computer Science Department in the 70's. In the same years, he also founded CIGER, a local firm specialised in automation projects in public administrations and has been director during three years. Until recently, François Bodart was member of NEW, an institution devoted to the social and economic promotion of the Province of Namur and has been one of the main advisors of Jean-Louis Close, the mayor of Namur, on ICT aspects. In fact, François Bodart is the initiator of this project since he wrote the 'schéma directeur' which constitutes the first step of the project. He has been the informal and unofficial project manager of Périclès and is more concretely involved in the PBFlow application and in Syrecos (with some researchers of the Computer Science Department of the University of Namur). Since its quite recent involvement in WIN, an important telecom project for the Walloon Government and maybe also due to the difficult relations that he has with some of the actors, he is less and less implicated in Périclès. However, even if his position in the project is criticised by some of the other actors because he is or has been involved personally in most of the Périclès actors which makes its status in the discussions rather ambiguous, his initiative, regardless future success or failure, has made things change in Namur.
The second important actor of the project is the mayor, Jean-Louis Close and the City of Namur in general, represented by its 'chief'. Since a long time, Jean-Louis Close has been persuaded of the potentialities of ICT for his city and region. He responded then quickly and positively when François Bodart asked him to participate in Périclès. The City of Namur was then involved in two applications: PBFlow and the citizens application. The local council, which is governed by a coalition of socialists and Christian Democrats, obtained a political consensus on this project and the consecutive investments but, as usual, people will always say that this is not enough. Not enough to engage people in order to respond to the potential increasing demand for information by citizens, not enough to make a organisational audit of the administration in order to use the technology for a better functioning of the administration.
The BEPN, Bureau Economique de la Province de Namur, is a provincial institution dedicated to the economic development of the local enterprises. In fact, before François Bodart, they can be considered as the initiators of Périclès since they ordered the 'schéma directeur' to CIGER and thus to François Bodart. Moreover, they are concretely involved in the Syrecos application (official and theoretical project manager) and more particularly in the implication of the local SMEs in the project.
NEW, Namur-Europe-Wallonie, an institution devoted to the social and economic promotion of the Province of Namur, is involved in Périclès as project manager of the citizens application.
CIGER is an IT firm specialised in computerisation of administrations and public services. It has a kind of monopoly in that field, mainly in the Province of Namur and, since recently, is not really used to the requirements of the private competition. It works a bit like in the old public monopolies, as in the telecom sector, where the supplier imposes its requirements to the client. CIGER has been involved in the project at the beginning when asked by the BEPN to design guidelines for an IT development in the Province of Namur, even if they did not write these guidelines themselves, since this was done by François Bodart, member of the management board of the firm. But in François Bodart's minds, it was rather clear that CIGER will be the technical operator of the project and of its technical infrastructure. For economic reasons mainly, especially the employment argument since CIGER employs more than 120 persons in the Region and has to maintain its position in a more and more competitive environment. But at the beginning, CIGER was not very enthusiastic about the proposal because they did not see the return on investment. It is then surprising to notice that they began involved in a project without being very much willing to do so. Since then, things has changed in CIGER: they had a new director, a new shareholder (Crédit Communal, the bank of the local municipalities in Belgium) and a new structure (they became a limited company). This has implications in their involvement in Périclès as we will see later. Concretely, CIGER is the technical operator of the Syrecos project, as well as the operational project manager, and of the citizens application.
The two other actors are less implicated in the project but are still important. The first one is the Belgian telecom operator, Belgacom, which has been approached by François Bodart at the beginning of the project to supply parts of the infrastructure. After some months of negotiation and discussions, nothing concrete in terms of collaboration and partnership came out from all of this. The main reasons for this failure in negotiation is the fact that Belgacom was mostly interested by the citizens application. But, as this application developed very slowly and in an imprecise direction, as this was not considered as a priority by most of the partners, Belgacom took contacts in other cities(4). The other reason was that they have been theoretically implied in the 'schéma directeur' without asking them their requirements clearly at that time. Concretely, they are still interested by 'making something' in Périclès and are waiting for answer 'from somebody'.
The last actor is a local one, Les Nouveaux Médias de l'Avenir, a subsidiary of an important press group, Vers l'Avenir, currently positioning itself in the Belgian French-speaking press landscape. They had been mostly implicated in the citizens application. During almost one year (October 96 to August 97), they had done a lot in making this application live. They were responsible for the information area of the application. They then made a Web site for their Journal which was directly accessible through the citizens application, they had to pay for it (at CIGER), they engaged two people to fill in this Web site and they then realised that the rest of the application was not changing so much. So they decided to slow down the rhythm of their contribution and to adopt the same rhythm as the others.
In such a project carried by many actors, there are of course a multitude of objectives. Among these objectives, some are acknowledged and well-known, others are hidden. If we look at the official objectives, as described in the official press file in October 96, we find:
These are the official objectives but through the document, we also find
As underlined above, there are also many individual objectives concerning this project. As far as we know, François Bodart, for example, had a scientific interest for the workflow process used in the PBFlow application. He was also interested by the implication of CIGER in the project, and maybe also by the possibility of obtaining research contracts for the University. At a more personal level and being a citizen of Namur for a long time, he also wanted to set up a project that could help the development of his city.
For Jean-Louis Close, the mayor of the City, the objective of the project was mostly cultural: to change everybody's culture and to " bring the world in the people's mind ". There is also an economic objective: developing the know how of Namur firms and promote them, developing the economic activities, encouraging SMEs in their use of ICT. Lastly, there is a less clearly expressed objective of a better transparency of the administration functioning and better links with the citizens. As the mayor is a politician, there must also be a political or electoral objective or, more generally, the will to promote the image of Namur as a modern and communicating city. NEW has more or less the same economic objectives as the mayor and the aim of promoting the image of the city.
For the BEPN, specialised in the economic development of the local enterprises, the main objective was to improve its supply of services to the SMEs from an industrial and commercial point of view.
Even if nothing concrete emerged from the negotiations, Belgacom was interested in participating in the project because, as many traditional telecom operators, they are interested in providing content applications and not only infrastructure and to position themselves in a new market. They feeled, as it is the case in other countries, that local applications with local content can lead to commercial opportunities. That is the reason why they answered positively to François Bodart's demand to join the project. However, they were mostly interested by the citizens application and by testing a new product that they were developing.
As far as Les Nouveaux Médias de l'Avenir (NMA) are concerned, they were interested by the project because they believed that this could be an extension of what they are doing at the present time with the newspapers. As already explained, NMA is a subsidiary of Vers l'Avenir, an important French-speaking Belgian press group. In its newspapers, Vers l'Avenir tries to create or maintain local communities by providing very local information. In Périclès, they also wanted to provide local information to contribute to the set up of a local virtual community. But, as already mentioned, they recently withdrew from the project.
Finally, besides the objectives of the actors, one has to wonder about the partners' actual motivation. In fact, few of them (NMA, CIGER recently) are private firms with requirements of profitability which can influence their concrete implication in the project and their will to quickly go through. Moreover, it seems that some actors get involved in the project for emotional reasons, more than for economic or rational ones. They wanted to make something for Namur or to follow some specific objectives. They believed that it will take time to make things change. Consequently, sometimes, even if they did not agree with each part of the project (choice of the application, of the partners, involvement of the users), they did not want to put another obstacle to this project.
Concerning the main challenges of the project, they have been expressed by François Bodart himself in the " schéma directeur " as the existing weaknesses of Namur (pp. 8-9). At the economic level and due to the nature of the economic activities in Namur, he wrote that the demand for operational ICT infrastructure is not very high and that only the administrative activity of the City, also as the capital of the Walloon Region, could lead to an increase demand for ICT infrastructure. He also underlined that the economic power of Namur is quite low in terms of possibilities to attract regional and federal subsidies. Moreover, the supplu of ICT services in Namur is not enough developed on an industrial level. It came mostly from little SMEs whose viability is not certain (p. 9). These are reasons to have a voluntarist approach in the field of ICT as it will not come from the private sector.
But there were also more psychological challenges. Indeed, François Bodart underlined that in Namur, "the wealth of the purposes is usually more important than the will of achievement" (p. 9). He also emphasised the fact that Namur is a provincial town of 100.000 inhabitants where there are a lot of rivalries, linked to the will of being the first to be seen on the stage and that given this situation, it is sometimes difficult to contribute collectively and on a more impersonal way into a common project (p. 9).
It seems that the situation has been rather well analysed by François Bodart, since some of these problems did appear during the project. It is not usual to have such a realistic approach of the problems that can be encountered before the beginning of a project. It appears then necessary to be particularly watchful about them. But it appears that, once explained in this original report, they have been completely forgotten by the different actors and by François Bodart himself, and nothing seems to have been concretely done to overcome these potential obstacles.
In the " schéma-directeur ", the overall budget of the three applications is estimated at BEF 100 millions (ECU 2.48 millions) of which around 12.5 % are dedicated to the citizens application, 35.4 % for the common infrastructure to be used by the three applications and 5.4 % for the accompanying structure of Périclès. This is financed by the European Commission in the Telematics Application program (for the Syrecos application), by the Walloon Region (PB Flow application) and almost half of the total budget by the different partners. The ambition was to convince Belgacom, the national telecom operator, to participate in the project and in the financing but, for already explained reasons, negotiations never succeeded.
One of the difficulties encountered in the search for funding was the business plan aspect. In fact, this was quite difficult to write since the perspective of commercial return was extremely vague, even if the will of market generic applications was clearly explained as one of the main objectives of the project.
At a moment, the idea of creating a private company for the management of the project was raised but never materialised.
Périclès is mainly an Intranet for Namur that can be accessed through phone lines and a modem. The access is free except for the local communications of course which are paid to Belgacom. Users can obtain an e-mail access freely and they get access to the namur.be server (and to Syrecos) as well as to some local and other servers selected by the project manager and which are accessible through the Proxy technique in the users' browser. These selected servers are different institutions or firms working in the field of ICT: the University of Namur, the University of Gembloux (near Namur), some local Internet Service Providers. Other more institutional servers can also be accessed (Communauté française de Belgique, Chant choral, Wallonie en ligne).
Besides the Intranet solution, the technological choices made are rather complex, mainly for the PBFlow application and Syrecos. For the citizens application, it was decided at the beginning of the project, not to create a simple Web site, as indicated in the press file (5): "In Namur, all the concerned operators decided not to limit themselves to the creation of an Internet site, obliged visit card of modernity that a lot of municipalities have to sacrifice to for a very weak contribution to the life of citizens and actors of the local economy" (own translation, p. 2). However, one has to notice that the present version of the citizens application is only a Web site and, moreover, a federation of different existing sites.
At the level of the technical infrastructure, there are two servers located in CIGER, one for Syrecos and one for the citizens application. The different actors (City of Namur, BEPN, CIGER,...) get connected to CIGER through ISDN lines, through their Internet connection or via the traditional commuted network through a modem.
The technical choices are the result of negotiations between some actors, mostly CIGER, François Bodart and some people involved in the project at the University of Namur. In 1994-1995, Microsoft solutions for Internet were emerging and it was not easy to predict the outcome of the technical development. In front of this technical uncertainty, different solutions were taken for the three applications (Syrecos, PBFlow and the citizens applications). To summarise, CIGER wanted to use the Perl programming language language inherited from Unix while people from the Computer Science Department of the University of Namur wanted to use Microsoft solutions and a NT operating system in a Visual Basic environment. It was difficult to reach an agreement, especially for the PBFlow application where the University played an important role and wanted to use its preferred technical solutions. Since this standed in clear opposition with CIGER, the University decided to move away from CIGER in this application, to play the role of technical operator of this project and using Microsoft environment.
For the two other applications, it was decided to use a NT server with a Netscape Web server but programmed with Perl. In fact, this solution shows its limit mostly at the level of the possible evolutions, the potential genericity of the products derived from this solution and the maintenance of the system. At the present time, there are plans to move to Microsoft techniques since now, all the new Internet technologies integrate Microsoft latest developments.
It appears then that, in front of the technological uncertainty, there were two attitudes. The first one bet on Microsoft and, due to the fact that Microsoft rapidly proposed new developments in that field, they won their bet. But, for the two other applications, they wanted to control the uncertainty by using well known and controlled but limited technologies from which they will have to change now.
Without giving too much details concerning an already much complex situation, let us mention that, for the Syrecos project, the negotiations were even more difficult because Syrecos is a European project of the Telematics Application program and involves European partners which also had specific technical requirements. Moreover, at that time, nothing was said on IP technologies and Internet in this Telematic Application program. So, while responding to the European Call for Tender, the European partners were not urged to include these techniques in their proposal.
Let us recall that Périclès was conceived as a global project with a common infrastructure and identical technical solutions in order to allow a certain genericity and a consequent marketing of the products, mainly by CIGER. It seems thus that, on the technical level, things already moved away from this global concept and this can be considered as a first fissure in this perspective.
Concerning the server namur.be itself, the Web site is not very user-friendly. It is rather difficult, since this is more and more a federation of existing local Web sites, to find one's way through the server and to find the information one is looking for.
As Périclès is a global project, we have decided to focus on the citizens application which, in our view, fits more into the definition of a digital city, in fact in its theoretical form or as it is intended to become.
At the beginning of the project, the 'serveur citoyens' was to propose the following services:
Even if, at the beginning, the citizens application was not devoted to become a Web site, at the present time, this is what it turns to be. Moreover, this is a federation of Web site related to Namur. Concretely, this application is not called 'serveur citoyens' anymore but namur.be which is the URL of a Web site giving access to information on the City of Namur, on the Province of Namur, to general information on Périclès, to Namur on line, etc. But except the creation of new rubrics (Communes, Schools, Entreprises, Gastronomy, Sports, Urgency, ...) on Namur en ligne), more than one year after, things have not changed so much:
It is difficult to precisely estimate the use of these services since people working at NEW, the project manager of the citizens application, do not even have statistics about this use. In fact, this is due to a technical change in the server managed by CIGER and to the fact that to adapt the new server in order to provide statistics, CIGER asked NEW to pay and the latter refused. This is an example of the kind of problems that occur in the project due to bad relations, misunderstanding and mistrust between some Périclès actors.
The implication of users in the conception of a project and even in its realisation can notably be seen through the attention given to them in the aspects of access, training and support.
Even if access, training and support have been said to be important for Périclès implementation among the potential users ('schéma directeur', p. 93), nothing concrete happened.
Concerning access to the citizens application, as we mostly concentrate on this one, users can reach the Web site through the local Intranet with a modem. Apart from this connection from home, there is one PC at the City Hall and one in the public library. At the present time, that's all! Apparently, there is no strategy on that field and no concrete will to change things. Contacts have been made with the Post Office or youth centres but those ones are not very enthusiastic about affording the cost of the local communications. Moreover, there is the problem of the open hours of these offices and the fact that they are really close to the City Hall itself. One could then wonder if it would not be more relevant to put PCs in the outskirts or accessible outside traditional office hours.
Regarding internal users, i.e. the administrative staff, they had the possibility to get a new equipment (Pentium 133) at a cheap rate. This limited offer had much success but these equipments are to be used at home. As far as training is concerned, internal users receive traditional lessons for office automation softwares but nothing is organised for citizens.
In fact, it seems to be the role of the project manager, i.e. NEW, to design the strategy for access and training. During some months, its director tried to conclude an agreement with an important Belgian brewery, Interbrew, in order to set up a 'communicating home' in Namur, a kind of cybercafé where citizens would have been trained to ICT and sensitized. For different reasons, notably the fact that Interbrew invest in the same kind of concept in Brussels (Cyberthéatre), the agreement was never reached. But no other project was set up.
This problem of training and access confirms what most interviewees expressed, i.e. that the citizens application was the 'poor relation' of Périclès at the beginning, that the two other applications get much more attention from the conceivers of the project. However, access and training are not much developed for these two applications, i.e. for the architects and the administrative staff for PBFlow or for SMEs in Syrecos.
This reflects the dominating technology push in this project: users will follow the technological supply. This vision is so well embodied in the project that no study has been conducted on the level of equipment of the potential users: citizens, SMEs, administration, architects. It is as if the conceivers knew that this could become an obstacle to the project and that they prefer to think of it after some months or years of design of the technology away from considerations about users and the potential demand.
Moreover, no study had been made on users needs concerning services that they would like to be provided by such an on-line service. The conceivers had no idea of the kind of service that could add some value for the citizens. This further reinforces the technology push vision. Indeed, one could maybe think that if interesting, relevant and value added services are provided to citizens, even if they do not have the necessary equipment at home, they will try 'somehow' to have access to these services. But if the equipment is insufficient and that moreover the services provided offer no concrete interest, how and why would citizens get connected? It is as if these fundamental questions were never raised or at least never answered by the conceivers and main actors of Périclès.
More generally, this raises the question of the conception of the public service and of the public interest in this project and especially of the problem of a 'public service' being conceived by a university professor whose job is not to think in terms of public service, public interest or general interest. In fact, this gives the impression that things have been thought in terms of technological means and not in terms of a service to provide to citizens, SMEs and even to administrations.
First of all, let us say that there are few information on Périclès. At the launch of the project, in October 96, there have been some press articles at the local, regional and federal newspapers and Namur was presented in the press as an advanced city in terms of ICT. But the citizens themselves, except maybe those who are already interested by ICT, do not seem to know Périclès. Of course, an extensive study would have to be done to know precisely the extent of this misreading. For the citizens application which is the more visible one, since the two others are dedicated to a more limited public, this is maybe an intentional strategy. Indeed, most of the interviewees recognise that the services proposed have a low interest and value added for citizens. This is then maybe not relevant to make these services known but to wait some time for new services to come. Moreover, to give the possibility for citizens to interact with the administration and to ask for information could increase the load of work for the administrative staff and no work re-organisation had been thought and implemented. Thus, there is a risk that people ask for information and that nobody will be there to answer, which is not good for the image of the City and of its administration.
This concerned the general information for the public but, if we look at the press file given in October 96, interesting things can be underlined and particularly, the grandiloquent and even presumptuous tone of the document, also emphasised by one interviewee who said that "maybe, we were too presumptuous. We wanted to make too many things, too complicated". Another one explained that "if the result of all of this was only a federation of existing Web sites, it wasn't necessary to make it so important and to make so much noise". We find this presumptuous tone in different sentences:
In general, there was a lot of imprecisions in the official document, about the sensitization campaign for example (see above) or the fact that Belgacom will join the project (without a firm agreement on this collaboration).
Finally and once more, in this kind of virtual city projects, the argument of the improvement of the local democracy, of a better functioning of the administration are used to justify the project but without a real reflection on the concepts used, on the fact that a technology cannot change local practices, cannot change the administration without a deep and deliberate re-organisation.
Even if from the outside and based on some SLIM objectives, this project may appear as a failure, most of the actors do not feel it like that at least if things change dramatically in the following weeks and months. In fact, most of the actors are discouraged by the lack of management of the project, by the prevailing mistrust between the "partners", by the fact that there are few visible realisations. Some of them want these problems to be resolved soon, before the end of the financing period (August 98) or after.
But at the present time, in some of the involved institutions (City of Namur, BEPN), this project has allowed a kind of awareness of the potential value added of ICT and has increased the level of equipment of the internal staffs and their sensitization to ICT.
It has enabled CIGER to start developing expertise in the Internet domain. It is however too early to know whether this rather bureaucratic institution, which has only recently turned into a limited company, will be able to adapt to this very competitive Internet market segment and to market the expertise acquired in Périclès.
During some weeks, it allowed Namur to appear as one of the most advanced Walloon city in the field of ICT but for one year, many other cities have taken initiatives in this domain and some of them are now far more advanced than Namur, maybe because they were less presumptuous at the beginning. Regarding direct and interactive links to the administration for example, this possibility does not exist in most of these digital cities, like Marche or Dinant for instance, mostly because these Web sites have been made by intermediaries without real implication of the City administrative staff. But in fact, the citizen, do not really care about the status of the people who make these sites. What is important for them is the nature of the available information, its relevance and value added.
That is the reason why most of the people involved in Périclès, at least in the citizens application, want a serious, deep and rapid discussion of the problems in order to give the project all chances to go away from a failure.
NB. This last part is still under construction. We then only propose hereafter the main ideas that will be developed in the following weeks.
1) Most of the problems encountered in this case came from the will to control and centralise everything, to impose a very controlled technology and system to a social and economic context which appeared very uncontrolled during the concrete implementation of the project. This very controlled process has influence on a lot of aspects of the project.
2) This project was too ambitious and maybe too long in a technical domain where things are moving extremely quickly.
3) Périclès shows a typical opposition between two worlds. The first one is represented by the University and the technical operator, i.e. those 'who know' (how to manage a project, which technical choices are to be made, ...). The second one is made by people who are working on the field and concretely realise the project. The problem is that they do not listen to each other and, maybe more deeply, they do not respect each other's point of view. It is more generally the opposition between a computer logic and an information logic. But a possible consequence of this is to put the latter ones off the technique and ICT in general which have to be a means in the service of the content and not the opposite.
To be developed in the following weeks.
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