National research programme Digital collaboration (PEPR eNSEMBLE)
The eNSEMBLE programme has the objective of fundamentally redefining digital tools for collaboration, in order to address the future challenges of digital collaboration and thus improve productivity, learning, care, and well-being, as well as participatory democracy.
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The eNSEMBLE PEPR aims to fundamentally redefine digital tools for collaboration. The pandemic has given us a glimpse of both the possibilities and the limitations of current tools for digitally mediated collaboration. Whether it's to reduce our travel, to better connect the territory, or to face the problems and transformations of the next few decades, the challenges of the 21st century will require us to collaborate at an unprecedented speed and scale. To do this, a paradigm shift in the design of collaborative systems is necessary. To collaborate in a fluid and natural way while taking advantage of the capabilities of digital technology, collaboration and sharing must become native features of digital systems, just like files and applications are today. To achieve this, we need to invent shared digital spaces that go beyond replicating the physical world in virtual environments, allowing co-located and/or geographically distributed teams to work together in a fluid and efficient manner.
Beyond this technological challenge, the Digital Collaboration research program also carries a sovereignty and societal challenge: by creating the conditions for interoperability between communication and sharing services to open up the "walled gardens" that force all participants to use the same services, the objective is to enable new actors to propose solutions adapted to the needs and usage contexts. Users will thus be able to choose combinations of tools and services, potentially "intelligent", to define mixed physical and digital collaboration spaces that meet their needs, without hindering their ability to exchange with the rest of the world. By making these services more accessible to a wider population, it will be possible to contribute to reducing the digital divide.