Recherche:OpenLabs/Le projet de recherche exploratoire


Title modifier

Open Laboratories: crossing boundaries, institutionalizing practices?

Project Coordinators (IFRIS) modifier

UMR LISIS

·        Evelyne Lhoste, chargée de recherche INRA

·        Marc Barbier, directeur de recherche INRA

·        Philippe Brunet, professeur UPEM

·        Morgan Meyer, maître de conférences, AgroParisTech


UMR LISE

·        Michel Lallement, Professeur du Cnam, chaire d'analyse sociologique du travail

·        Marie-Christine Bureau, Chargée de recherche CNRS

·        Luis Felipe Rosado Murillo, postdoc, IFRIS – LISE

Other researchers modifier

Institut des sciences de la communication CNRS / Paris-Sorbonne / UPMC

·        Ksenia Ermoshina, postdoc

Abstract modifier

Emergent spaces for fabrication and experimentation with new collaborative practices (such as makerspaces, (bio)hackerspaces, fablabs and living labs, and other “innovation spaces”) are currently being formed around alternative organizational models with varying degrees of formalization, flexibility, and openness to public participation. Assuming hybrid and transitional forms between non- and for-profit enterprises, these new sociotechnical collectives hold the promise of democratizing innovation. Because they are situated at the intersection between distinct sociotechnical worlds, these emergent practices and discourses on innovation operate within the double tension between, on the one hand, creation/innovation and repair/bricolage and on the other, market and public/community activities.  They have varying degrees of openness to citizens (individuals and NGOs) and to partnership with the public sector (regional and city administration, national agencies, etc.), as well as with professional networks and companies.


Our research collaboration will draw and expand upon our preliminary findings on open labs in France, which have demonstrated that these emergent sociotechnical arrangements contribute to organizational transformations through the institutionnalisation of open innovation. As an effect of ongoing institutionalization, “open laboratories and workshops” (which we will hereafter refer to as open labs) are witnessing displacements of heterogeneous sets of technoscientific practices under the nebulous rubrics  of “hacking” and “open innovation”, “solidarity economy” and “maker movement”. These dynamics of displacement raise the question of institutionalization to the practitioners attached to alternative practices and facing practical problems as well as the analysts interested in providing a better understanding of emergent forms of open research and innovation. For example, many alternative organizational and collaborative work practices are not oriented by the profit imperative which raises the question of their sustainability as well as their patterns of hybridization to for-profit and public organizations. Moreover, the social differences between early lead-users and adopters (identified as the “chiasm of innovation”) has to be investigated for the sake of inclusiveness in the “every day life of the places” and to further help us understand organizational transformations in the process of institutionalization. Finally, our goal is to understand the linkage between everyday technoscientific practices and knowledge production regimes more broadly.


Based on the study of sociotechnical variations across spatial and temporal scales, we propose to analyze materialities, knowledge infrastructures, and institutional arrangements of emergent “open laboratories and workshops” in France.


Our partners in this project include various open labs with varying degrees of institutionalization and autonomy from for-profit and public funders. Our ultimate goal  is to establish a forum for collaborative research and action on the promises and challenges of open innovation. For this purpose, we have a double task: 1) to develop an interdisciplinary and comparative study across IFRIS research laboratories; 2) to connect  collaborative and interdisciplinary research efforts at IFRIS with non-academic experts on “open labs”  in France and abroad. This double task will be performed through experimentation with an “Itinerant and Experimental IFRIS Labs” (IEILs) alongside the practitioners of open labs. IEILs will take the format of workshops, hackathons or cryptoparties.


While the project is not the first one to gather observations on open labs, it will provide a new analytical and synthetic focus by comparing and contrasting across empirical cases. The combination of qualitative and digital methods will allow for an original analytical framework. In addition to participant observation and semi-structured interviews, the CorTexT digital platform will be used to quantitatively map the activities of open labs in different arenas of institutional and public activity (government, social and print media).

Collaboration across IFRIS laboratories modifier

This project is inscribed in the context of STS research on social, technical, and economic regulatory environments and their technoscientific projects. Emergent sociotechnical collectives are key agents of change in our contemporary societies. The way these new collective actors change the existing technoscientific models and infrastructures is of primary interest to the IFRIS research network. One of the main research axes of the LISIS, for example, is the notion of “transition” concerning the pathways in which a technoscientific model is progressively substituted. At the LISE, the transformations of productive arrangements, labor relations, organizational models, and technopolitical utopias harbored by open labs is one of the  major research interests.


In order to make the most out of this convergence of research interests across IFRIS laboratories, we will organize regular meetings for sharing our preliminary results and establish collaborative ties among students, researchers, and other professionals who are working with open labs on local, regional, and national scales.


In addition, we will take advantage of the CorTexT digital platform to address larger patterns of exchange and collaboration across open labs in France.  The CorTexT platform will be engaged in this project on the side of proposing methods but also on the side of organizing and funding events. A previous support to the NGO HackYourPhD in 2016 has opened opportunities for Participatory-Action-Research that aims to mix technological and research capacities.

Research objectives modifier

Our project concerns the ways in which knowledge, practical know-how, tools and infrastructures are produced and circulated through emergent spaces of collaborative and experimental work (i.e. open labs). The main goal is to understand how open labs transform and are transformed by established institutions. Our collaboration involves different approaches to science and technology studies, drawing from various disciplines such as organization studies, anthropology, and sociology to address the question of institutionalization of emergent spaces for open innovation.


Open labs have emerged all across France as community-based or university-based places, some of them running experiments with the “social and solidarity economy” while others are more oriented toward “traditional” business models. In broader terms, open labs constitute a « place and a process supported by diverse groups of actors which aim to renew modalities of innovation and creation by employing open, collaborative and iterative processes to materialize physically or virtually” (Mérindol, 2016, our translation). In relation to open labs, the literature on “Third Places “[1] emphasizes their capacity to facilitate the emergence of collective projects with the aim to preserving the values they produce in local territories. Therefore, we have chosen to study open labs which are open to public participation and which share a set of values around openness and horizontality under a “connexionist logic” (Boltanski and Thevenot, 1999) which also raise questions about individual or collective identity (Flichy, 2004).


Open labs are part of a dynamic of institutionalization through collaborative practices stemming from hacking (Lhoste and Barbier, 2016; Bureau, Hoffman and Lallement, in press). This dynamic is driven by the “positive virality of garage practices” which allows to think “outside the box” of the established technosciences (Meyer, 2015). It provides continuity with several other movements, such as the counter-culture and Do-It-Yourself repair groups (Turner and Brand 2012), makers and hackers (Lallement, 2015), commons-based peer production collectives (Benkler and Nissenbaum, 2006; Kostakis, Niaros, and Giotitsas, 2014), Free and Open Source technologists (Kelty, 2008; Broca, 2015), and, even, French libertarians (Sarrasin et al. 2012). A substantial literature in the social sciences has been dedicated to the study of innovation by users (vonHippel, 2005; Hyysalo et al. 2016), grassroot innovation processes (Cardon, 2010; Auray, 2009; Auray, 2015), self-organized hacking communities (Eliott, 2006; Heylighen, 2007; Heylighen, 2016), labor arrangements and horizontal decision making (Lallement, 2015); and several reports on open labs have been published in various countries (Bosqué et al, 2014; Bottolier-Depois, 2014; Herman and Biuching, 2013; Mérindol et al. 2016).


In this research project we will critically address the dynamics of institutionalization “from below” by analyzing technical choices and organizational practices of these communities and their collaboration with governmental structures, private entities, and funding institutions.


We are interested in analyzing how open labs modify established knowledge production regimes and organizational structures:

·        What institutional arrangements, partnerships and regulatory environments do open labs originate from?

·        What are the types of boundary-work involved in their institutionalization? How are separate worlds brought together?

·        What do these labs produce in terms of materialities, knowledge, norms and organizations?

·        What are the trajectories of their participants and their technoscientific projects? What sociotechnical effects do they produce? How do they impact existent technoscientific institutions?

Theoretical and methodological framework modifier

Our research collaboration mobilizes an STS approach to analyze the dynamics of sociotechnical transformations through different analytical frames. We pay particular attention to the materiality of practices to conceptualize the interactions between socio-technical collectives on local and global levels of analysis. We are focused primarily on the institutionalization that accompanies the creation and development of open labs such as makerspaces, hackerspaces, fablabs, living labs, and other “innovation spaces”. In the organization theory literature, institutionalization is the process through which patterned relations and actions “gradually acquire the moral and ontological status of taken-for-granted facts which, in turn, shape future interactions and negotiations” (Barley and Tolbert, 1997).


The analysts of our research team study the dynamics of sociotechnical transformations at different spatial and temporal scales. We examine primarily the relationship between boundary activities in knowledge production, the moderating effects of organizational factors in context, and the mediating effects of institutional entrepreneurs (Di Maggio, 1988) in open labs which sustain their activities primarily through an ethos of“learning-by-doing”, while claiming openness to public participation and fostering collaborative values with shared symbols of hacking, individual and community empowerment, access to knowledge, technical autonomy, etc.  As part of our research program :

·        we will compare our ethnographic materials across cases to find points of convergence and divergence regarding themes of shared interest for the research co-participants. In conducting the analysis and interpretation of our qualitative data, we will attend to: 1) the main topics of shared interest; 2) common and divergent narratives across sites; 3) the cooperation these spaces entertain or foreclose; 4) the trajectory of active participants and founders alongside the trajectory of their projects; 5) the networking activities and strategies of legitimation of agents.

·        for the purposes of collaborative engagement and dissemination, we will co-organize events such as workshops (hands-on and others), hackathons, cryptoparties with active open lab founders and members. We propose to call these events “Itinerant and Experimental IFRIS Lab” (IEIL). We will bring together researchers from the IFRIS network and practitioners from the open lab community to explore interfaces between research in humanities and social sciences with hands-on technical and experimental work. These “temporary laboratory” will be instantiated at existent open labs in France to interface with our academic research and research networks at IFRIS.

·        taking advantage of the CorTexT platform, some of these events include digital harvesting as well as analysis of textual data from various sources. This kind of hackathon has been previously experimented by Marc Barbier with the NGO HackYourPhD in 2016. It explored the transformative potential of Participatory-Action-Research that aims at mixing technological and research capacities. Media databases (Factiva), scientific databases (Scopus, conference paper corpuses, arXiv) and social media such as twitter and Youtube are sources of data through web scrapping and crawling. Based on the technique of textual annotation we will conduct: 1. a documentary analysis to characterize the world of open lab participants “from the inside” through their digital traces and active engagement with digital publics. Deep data mining and analysis conducted through the CorTexT platform will report on how the subcultures of open labs are produced, circulates and is “given” to the world and users ; 2. a rather classical sociosemantic analysis of media and scientific databases to afford the institutionalization of “makers’ subculture” in the world of science and technology and in the daily press (national and regional). Such a contextual characterization is needed to link observations of individual and collective practices and structuration processes of the movement of open labs to larger institutional and communicational traces of the affordance of open labs in the public sphere.


Our project is designed to initiate the structuration of an IFRIS community on this theme, providing access to the practitioners through action research. For this purpose, we will:


·        organize seminars to discuss and compare the institutionalization of “open lab” based on our shared empirical data ;

·        experiment with the “Itinerant and Experimental IFRIS Lab” (IEIL) to actively participate in the everyday work and life of open labs.


Proposed outcomes


The IEILs will be conducted in various sites according to the analysts and practitioners interests. Themes of shared interest will include: open licensing models, inclusive practices and knowledge circulation, digital fabrication tools and techniques, history of free and open source technologies, and broader debates about open innovation, ethics, environmental sustainability and responsibility. In table 1, we provide a short description of the involvement of each member of our research team. To further build upon these propositions, we will invite practitioners to join our research steering committee.

LISIS will coordinate the research program (Evelyne Lhoste) and the CorTexT IEILs and data analysis (Marc Barbier). Evelyne Lhoste along with Pascal Minguet (co-founder of Net-iki and chargé de mission - Transformation numérique au Conseil régional de Bourgogne-Franche- Comté) will experiment on the territorial networking in the Bourgogne/franche Comté region. This network was generated after the Fablab Netiki. This “living lab” is located in a village of 350 inhabitants. It was created in 2012 by the Net-IKi Association. This association was born in 2008 on the initiative of a collective of volunteers demanding broadband Internet access in their villages. After they succeeded, they managed to open a fablab in an ancient school. The founders declared that « Everyone pushes the door» demonstrating a striking balance between the search for growing social links while favouring technical skills. Although the founding chore volunteers have progressively worn over, the fablab is still working thanks to renewal of the members. It has actually spread over to constitute a network of a dozen of fablabs supported by the “Conseil départementaux” and the “Region”. Evelyne and Pascal will organize two IEILs (creative workshops) to gather together practitioners scattered over an area covering 300 km East to west and 200 km North to south. The participants will be invited to design a tool to improve networking. The design method will be oriented towards fostering creativity instead of favoring ex ante the need for a technical solution. The purpose is to produce knowledge on the organizational learning underneath institutionalization as well as to infer reflexivity from the practitioners.


LISE will organize a seminar series for the IFRIS community and be responsible for the ethnographic work with DataPaulette. Luis Felipe R. Murillo along with Alice Giordani (DataPaulette), Marie-Christine Bureau (CNAM-LISE), Michel Lallement (CNAM-LISE) and Cedric Honnet (DataPaulette) will explore the transition of a hackerspace (DataPaulette) from an association to an “organisme de formation” in France. This transition is leading DataPaulette to become an autonomous educational initiative to support workers in traditional fields of expertise who are curious to experiment with new forms of digital fabrication. From within and outside academia, the group has identified the need for active engagement between researchers in the humanities and social sciences with designers and technologists working at independent research and innovation laboratories. This need can be fulfilled through the design and development of interface devices to draw the interest of academic researchers and digital technologists alike. For this collaboration, we will create an e-textile USB-based controller for audio and video transcription. Through the creation of a simple hardware kit, we will promote the study of the conditions of production of fast-prototyping platforms at open labs while engaging in practical terms with the digital and material objects of experimental fabrication. We propose to build this interface at DataPaulette, an independent studio for research and development at the intersection between textiles and digital technologies, given their extended experience with independent research and innovation. In addition to collaborative research, DataPaulette members have extensive experience with public workshops on e-textiles for all skill levels. Our proposal has the potential to contribute positively to the future of collaborative engagements between researchers within and outside academia and facilitate mutual support and exchange to advance our understanding of the ongoing transformations in the landscape of science and technology with active public participation. Our fabrication workshops will gather designers, technologists, digital humanists and social scientists to create a USB controller for audio/video transcription based on fast prototyping technologies. In this workshop, we will introduce the participants to the basics of fast prototyping with e-textiles and Free and Open Source technologies. During the activity, the participants will sew their own e-textile switches and solder, assembly and configure their own USB pedals for audio and video transcription. All the required materials will be prepared and offered by the workshop proponents. The workshop will be followed by an open discussion with IFRIS and DataPaulette researchers.  The goal is to advance a shared understanding of Free and Open Source development models as they are put into practice at the workshop.


Ksenia Ermoshina will organize “cryptoparties” in the context of these temporary laboratories to address questions of information security, anonymity, and privacy. The cryptoparty is a specific format of an educational and networking event, aimed at sharing best practices in terms of informational security and privacy enhancing technologies. The name was firstly employed in 2011 but quickly became transnational and has been progressively institutionalized. The cryptoparties are mediating spaces, deploying a three-fold activity: they circulate knowledge about informational security, translate it and transform it (Meyer, 2010a). They also create transnational community of practice (Wenger, 1998) that intersects with hackers, activists, journalists, NGO workers, academic cryptographers. These cryptoparties are of particular interest to the community of open labs to address important questions about the future of Internet technologies and communities. Alongside with cryptoparties, she will also work to help organize hackathons to support the CorTexT platform and the broader development of digital technologies for the humanities and social sciences.


IEIL: short description of the propositions for each open lab.

Place Analyst Suggested questions Type of event
Network of fablabs in Bourgogne-Franche-comté Region Evelyne Lhoste How to manage sustainability/inclusiveness of the local network ? The theme will be refined with the local actors workshops and interviews in two different locations in the territory
DataPaulette Luis Felipe R. Murillo; Marie-Christine Bureau; Michel Lallement How does the transition from an independent hackerspace to a legal “organisme de formation” under French law affects the practices, organizational structures, and sociotechnical networks of open labs? workshop and seminar series at CNAM, UPEM and open labs
La Centrifugeuse, Marne la Vallée Marc Barbier Experiences of the FabLab format as a novel setting in University partnerships policy Follow-up, interviews and a reflexive workshop
Le Reset ;

Café Vie Privée

Ksenia Ermoshina Informational security and privacy : from tacit knowledge to best practices, guides and standardized solutions for users.

Institutionalization of cryptoparties.

Cryptoparty ; workshop with informational security trainers from the openlabs.
La Paillasse (Paris) Philippe Brunet, Morgan Meyer Practices, labor relations and norms of work projects
Pavilion 35 (Vienna), Scolopendre (Paris)


Morgan Meyer


Democratisation and ‘Amaterialisation’ of technologies


Workshops



In terms of broader impact, this project will consolidate the process of establishing networks between STS and open labs. Other partners for the continuation of the project will be identified and further funding will be sought for sustaining this initiative for the broader IFRIS community. In addition to the network building efforts in and outside academia, we will disseminate the IEIL collaborative experiment through our contributions to FAB14 (the international fablab conferences will be hosted in Toulouse-Paris in 2018) and ALLISS (an association promoting cooperation between civil society and Research and Education Institutions of which IFRIS is a member and co-founder). We will also participate and extend existing academic networks, publish scientific papers on IEIL, and organize panels at local and international conferences.

Bibliography modifier

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———. 2009. “Communautés En Ligne et Nouvelles Formes de Solidarité.” L’évolution Des Cultures Numériques, de La Mutation Du Lien Social À L’organisation Du Travail, Limoges, FYP Éditions, 58–66.

———. 2015. “Hackers à l’ouvrage.” La Vie Des Idées 27.

Barbier, Rémi, and Jean-Yves Trépos. 2007. “Humains et Non-Humains: Un Bilan D’étape de La Sociologie Des Collectifs.” Revue D’anthropologie Des Connaissances 1 (1): 35–58.

Barley, S. R., and P. S. Tolbert. 1997. “Institutionalization and Structuration: Studying the Links between Action and Institution.” Organization Studies 18 (1): 93–117. doi:10.1177/017084069701800106.

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Bureau, Marie-Christine ; Hoffman, Isabelle; Lallement, Michel. (2017) Makers: Un monde social en mouvement. (forthcoming).

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Flichy, P. (2004). L'individualisme connecté entre la technique numérique et la société. Réseaux, (2), 17-51.

Flichy, P. (2008). Understanding technological innovation: a socio-technical approach. Edward Elgar Publishing.

Gershenfeld, Neil. 2005. FAB. Basic Books.

Heylighen, F. (2007). “Why is open access development so successful? Stigmergic organization and the economics of information”. In Open Source Jahrbuch, edited by Bernd Lutterbeck, Mat Bärwolff and Robert A. Gehring (Eds.). Lehmanns Media.

Heylighen, F. (2016). Stigmergy as a universal coordination mechanism I: Definition and components. Cognitive Systems Research, 38, 4–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogsys.2015.12.002

Kelty, C. (2008). Two bits : the cultural significance of free software. Durham: Duke University Press.

Kostakis, Vasilis, Vasilis Niaros, and Christos Giotitsas. 2014. “Production and Governance in Hackerspaces: A Manifestation of Commons-Based Peer Production in the Physical Realm?” International Journal of Cultural Studies, 1367877913519310.

Lallement, Michel. 2015. L’âge du faire: hacking, travail, anarchie. Paris: Editions du Seuil.

Lhoste, Évelyne, and Marc Barbier. 2016. “FabLabs. L’institutionnalisation de Tiers-Lieux Du « Soft Hacking ».” Revue D’anthropologie Des Connaissances 10 (1): 43–69.

Mérindol, Valérie, Bouquin, Nadège, Versailles, David, Capdevila, Ignasi, Aubouin, Nicolas, La Chaffotec, Alexandra, Chiovetta, Alexis, and Voisin, Thomas. 2016. “Le Livre Blanc Des Open Labs Quelles Pratiques ? Quels Changements En France ?” ANRT/FutuRIS et PSB/newPIC.

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Budget modifier

Fab14 and scientific meetings Subsistence and travel expenses for 6 analysts 10 000,00 
IFRIS seminar series Most of the partners working and residing in Grand Paris, therefore the budget covers only the subsistence and travel expenses for invited practitioners residing outside the Ile-de-France region 2000,00  €
IEIL (Itinerant and Experimental IFRIS Lab) outside the Ile-de-France region '[2]' Subsistence and travel expenses for 2 analysts in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté 4 000,00 
Organisation of the Datapaulette  hands-on workshop Including support for the organizers, purchase of workshop materials, fabrics, microcontrollers, and cables which will be offered free of charge for 15 participants (including IFRIS analysts)

(15 kits per workshop, 15 participants/max for the hands-on workshop)

6 000,00 
Coordination expenses 2 200,00 
Total 24 200,00 


Support for eight Itinerant and Experimental IFRIS Lab (Hackathons and Cryptoparties) will be covered by the CorTexT Platform Budget.

IEIL (Itinerant and Experimental IFRIS Lab) Support for the IEIL lab, offering space and time for the workshop (x 8 sessions) 8 000,00 
IEIL Subsistence and organization expenses for 30 participants (x 8 sessions) 2 000,00 
Total 10 000,00 


Research plan and schedule modifier

Duration: 18 months

Time (Months) 0 6 12 18
Task 1: Research Activities
  Project Management KoM Follow-up Follow-up Final conference
  Data and Field experiments
  Analysis and publication
Task 2: Meeting and Events
  Organizational meetings (steering comitee) 1 2 2 2
  IEL  workshops, cryptoparties and hackathons 2 2 2 2
IFRIS seminar series 1 2


Research team


Evelyne Lhoste (project coordinator) is following up the diffusion-adoption of the “MIT model” in French fablabs since 2013. Her genealogical work is in fact an account of its transformation into a format (Barbier and Trépos 2007). After having described the foundation of many places based on values imbibed with the digital cultures and bricolage, she will analyze the networking within fablabs and with other organizations in different situations (urban / rural). The understanding of this process is set in a movement of the sociology of organizations that has asserted itself since Anthony Giddens’ work on social structuring, by transcending a dialectic of agency and structure through the exploration of organizational dynamics and (social, cultural and cognitive) institutional mechanisms between the two. Based on the actors’ discourses and practices, she characterizes the socio-materialities of the fablabs studied and monitors the diffusion of open innovation practices through institutional entrepreneurship. She will also characterize the kinds of boundary-work induced by the projects initiated in fablabs which bring together worlds previously separate.


Marc Barbier is a Senior Researcher in Sciences and Technology Studies at the National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) and former director of the Research Unit “Science in Society” in Marne La Vallée. His research interests and works contribute to the fields of social studies of knowledge regime in agriculture and of the governance of sustainability transitions under various pressures of change such as pesticide uses, emergent diseases, bioenergy and ecosystem services. He specialises in the longitudinal analysis of socio-economic and socio-political transformations of the agricultural word. This has driven him progressively focus on quantitative approaches and on the semantic analysis of large textual corpuses and on the mobilization of mix-methods and quali-quanti methods to study the emergence of new sociotechnical setting crossing social movement, scientific and technological promises and socio-political transformation of ST&I governance. He manages the CorTexT Platform of LISIS Unit with the support of the Institute for Research Innovation and Society (IFRIS). The objectives of CorTexT are to create, reshape and tune new or existing technologies in order to promote social sciences on Research, Innovation and Society. The CorTexT platform is a key-participant of the Infrastructure RISIS (EU-FP7) but is also involved in research activities to be plugged on or embedded in project sources by the open digital movement.

Philippe Brunet, continuing his research on work in science, will examine the boundary effects between fablabs and the more common places of scientific production (eg academic laboratories) for individuals and collectives that migrate from one to another. It will be necessary to establish how labor relations and the norms that result from them are identical and / or different from one world to another.


Ksenia Ermoshina is a postdoc in Nextleap.eu, interdisciplinary research project focused on issues of Internet privacy, encryption and decentralization of messaging protocols (Ermoshina et al. 2016). Ksenia works in close collaboration with teams of developers and hackers in several European countries on usability of cryptography. Her PhD thesis was dedicated to the phenomenon of “civic hacking” and civic tech: she has done a three-year ethnographic study of civic hackathons in France and Russia, as well as a survey of 6 mobile applications dedicated to social problems – from corruption to broken lamps and potholes. Ksenia’s knowledge of french civic hacking networks will be helpful for the project offering another angle of analysis of the process of institutionalization of civic hacking practices. She will expand the work she has done for her PhD thesis on civic hackathons. She will also offer a thorough analysis of the “how to…” guides produced by actors in different hacking communities, in order to understand the institutionalization of tacit knowledge and construction of shared expertise and language. Ksenia is organizing cryptoparties in Paris since spring 2016 and will contribute to the project by helping out to program and organize a cryptoparty.

Michel Lallement is Professor of Sociology at the CNAM (Conservatoire national des arts et métiers), Paris, France. His research affiliations are with the Lise-CNRS. He has written numerous articles on work, employment, industrial relations and international comparisons, including Le Travail. Une sociologie contemporaine (Gallimard, 2007), Le travail de l’utopie. Godin et le Familistère de Guise (Les Belles Lettres, 2009), Le travail sous tensions (Sciences Humaines, 2010), L’Âge du Faire. Hacking, travail, anarchie (Paris, Seuil, 2015) and Logique de classe. E. Goblot, la bourgeoisie et la distinction sociale (Les Belles Lettres, 2015). He currently works on the development and the transformantions of the so-called « Third-places », with a special interest for the hackerspaces and the fab labs. With I. Berrebi-Hoffmann and M. C. Bureau, he thus writes a book on the makers regarded a s a social world.


Morgan Meyer will examine do-it-yourself biology laboratories and thereby pursue his analysis of these spaces that he has been carrying out since 2011. His research has thus far examined various aspects: the materiality and the tools developed, the different kinds of boundary-work visible within labs, the processes of ‘amaterialisation’ and tinkering, the politics of the self. He will draw upon these research strands to further investigate and consolidate his analysis of the socio-materiality of open science and technology. He will, also, analyse the differences and kinds of boundary-work between various kinds of open laboratories in order to tease out their specificities and examine their activities as ‘situated practices’.


Luis Felipe R. Murillo will expand on his previous research work on the transnational hackerspace network. For this collaboration in particular, he will examine the practices of coordination and collaborative work at DataPaulette. The hackerspace DataPaulette is currently a place for informal gatherings, hackathons, and other forms of collaborative digital work involving designers, artists, and electronics engineers. The ethnographic study of DataPaulette and the hands-on workshops will provide us with a vantage into the emergent forms of collaboration and coordination of technoscientific work between large- and small-scale, traditional and open laboratories, and their strategies for enrolling partners across the spectrum of independent technical and artistic initiatives on local and global scales.  Luis Felipe R. Murillo will also work actively in creating bridges for exchange and collaborative work involving the international makerspace and hackerspace network with the local open labs and initiatives of the “Itinerant and Experimental IFRIS Lab”.

Publications of the project coordinators modifier

1.   Lhoste Évelyne, Barbier Marc (2016) FabLabs. L’institutionnalisation de Tiers-Lieux du «soft hacking ». Revue d'anthropologie des connaissances 1/2016 (Vol. 10, n° 1) , p. 43-69.

2.   Lhoste, É., & De Montera, B. (2011). L'expérimentation animale : une responsabilité à dire et à partager. Natures Sciences Sociétés, 19(2), 165-172.

3.   Chance, Q., Meyer, M. (2017, in press) ‘L’agriculture libre – les outils agricoles à l’épreuve de l’open source’ in Techniques & Culture

4.   Meyer, M., Wilbanks, R. (2017, in press) ‘Entre le garage, le public et le marché : valuations de la biologie do-it-yourself’ in O. Leclerc (ed.) Savants, artistes, citoyens : tous créateurs ?, Québec: Editions Science et bien commun

5.   Meyer, M. (2015) ‘Bricoler le vivant dans des garages. Le virus, le génie et le ministère’ in Terrain, No. 64, pp. 68-83

6.    Meyer, M. (2013) ‘Do-it-yourself biology: Challenges and Promises for an Open Science and Technology Movement’ in Systems and Synthetic Biology (with T. Landrain, A. M. Perez, R. Sussan), Vol. 7, No. 3, pp 115-126

7.    Meyer, M. (2013) ‘Introduction to special section: Intermediaries between science, policy and the market’ in Science and Public Policy, Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 423-429 (with M. Kearnes)

8.    Meyer, M. (2013) ‘Situating knowledge inter-mediation: insights from science shops and knowledge brokers’ in Science and Public Policy, Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 430-441 (with K. Schlierf)

9.   Meyer, M. (2013) ‘Domesticating and democratizing science: a geography of do-it-yourself biology’ in Journal of Material Culture, Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 117-134

10.  Meyer, M.  (2012) ‘Bricoler, domestiquer et contourner la science : l’essor de la biologie de garage’ in Réseaux, No. 173-174, pp. 303-328

11. Meyer, M. (2012) ‘Build your own lab: Do-it-yourself biology and the rise of citizen biotech-economies’ in Journal of Peer Production, Issue 2 [invited comment]

12. Murillo, Luis Felipe R. (2016). “New Expert Eyes Over Fukushima: Open Source Responses to the March 11 Disaster in Japan” in Anthropological Quarterly, volume 89, n.2.

13. Murillo, Luis Felipe R. and Christopher M. Kelty. (2016). “Hackers und Hacken” In: Digitalisierung: Theorien und Konzepte für die Empirische Forschung. Gertraud Koch, (ed.). Konstanz: UVK Press.

14.  Murillo, Luis Felipe R.; Currie, Morgan, and Kelty, Christopher. (2013). “Free software trajectories: From organized publics to formal social enterprises?” In: Journal of Peer Production 1(3).

15. Brunet, P. (2017)« Producing innovations : a low-key science policy on embryonic stem cells », Journal of innovation

16.  Brunet, P. (2016) « Les restes de l’industrie de l’uranium : conflits autour de leur prise en charge », Techniques et Culture, n°65-66

17.  Brunet, P. (2015) « Enjeux et approche de la rationalisation du travail dans la science contemporaine : Le cas de la « preuve de concept » dans le domaine biomédical », Les mondes du travail, n° 15

18.  Brunet, P. (2012) « Temporalités dans la recherche biomédicale : la science au travail saisie par le temps », La Nouvelle Revue du Travail, 1, décembre, 2012.

19.  Brunet, P. avec Dubois M. (2012), « Cellules souches et technoscience : sociologie de l’émergence et de la régulation d’un domaine de recherche biomédicale en France », Revue Française de Sociologie, 53-3, pp. 391-428

20.  Brunet, P. (2011) « Procès de production d’une recherche orientée entre chercheurs, malades et entrepreneurs : le cas d’une « biotech à but non lucratif » », Revue Interventions économiques, 43.

21.  Elzen, B., Barbier, M., Augustyn A.M., B. Van Mierlo (Editeur) (2017). AgroEcological Transitions: Changes and breakthroughs in the making. Wageningen, NL : Wageningen University. (forthcoming).

22. Arpin I., Barbier M., Ollivier G., Granjou C., (2016). Institutional entrepreneurship and techniques of inclusiveness in the creation of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, Ecology & Society.

23. Levain A., Vertes F., Ruiz L. ; Delaby L., Gascuel-Odoux C., Barbier M., (2015). 'I am an intensive guy': the possibility and conditions of reconciliation through the ecological intensification framework, Environmental Management, 2015, 56 (5) : 1184-1198 .

24.  Doré D. et Barbier M. (2015). Maintenir la vigilance. Les objets-frontière-transitionnel dans la pérennisation des dispositifs de surveillance des « soldats de Dieu », Revue d'Anthropologie des Connaissances, 9 (2): 189-212.

25. Loconto L.,  and Barbier M., (2014). Transitioning sustainability: performing ‘governing by standards’, In Susana Borrás and Jakob Edler (Eds.). Governance of Socio-Technical Systems, Edward Elgar EU-SPRI Series.

26.  Mauz., Barbier M., Granjou C., Breucker P., (2014). Making taxonomy environmentally relevant. Insights from an All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory. Environmental Science and Policy, 38 : 254–262.

27.  Cetro R., Barbier M., Breucker P., Eggermont H., Gambette P., Kyriakipoulos T., Le Roux X., Martineau C., Turenne N., (2014). Vers une approche semi-automatique pour la définition de motifs d'argumentation utilisés dans les résumés de projets scientifiques du domaine de la biodiversité, Revue des Nouvelles Technologies de l’Information, "Fouilles de données et humanités numériques", 47-80.

28.  Barbier M., Cauchard, L., Joly, P-B., Paradeise C., VInck D., (2013). Pour une approche pragmatique, écologique et politique de l’expertise. Revue d'Anthropologie des Connaissances, 7 (1) : 1-23. Barbier, M., Farges, M., Batifol, V., Mogoutov, A. (2012). Textual analysis and scientometric mapping of the dynamic knowledge in and around the IFSA community. In: Ika Darnhofer (Editor), David Gibbon (Editor), Benoît Dedieu (Eds), Farming systems research into the 21st century : The new dynamic (p. 73-94). Life Sciences. Dordrecht,


[1]              http://movilab.org/index.php?title=Définition_des_Tiers_Lieux. Last accessed: December 13, 2016

[2] The Conseil regional Bourgogne-Franche comté will support the organization of two IEIL in two fablabs of its network