Collaborative platforms and knowledge repositories face a paradox: they are built to support sustained cooperation, yet they themselves are fragile over time. Governance erodes, contributors drift, technology stacks become obsolete, and institutional funding cycles end. The PILOT project — part of France’s PEPR research programme — tackles this challenge head-on.

What PILOT sets out to do

PILOT aims to build a comprehensive set of technologies, visions, and guidelines for long-term collaboration. Rather than proposing a single platform, the project envisions a repository that serves as a reference point across the entire socio-technical stack: from infrastructure to use cases, from demonstrators to governance patterns. The work is organized around four axes: understanding emerging collaboration forms, investigating new technological capacities, defining socio-technical analysis tools, and producing actionable guidelines.

A practice-based approach

What sets PILOT apart is its methodological grounding. The project draws on Practice-Based Computing — a framework developed at the University of Siegen that insists design decisions be rooted in empirical observation of actual work practices. This means ethnographic fieldwork comes before system architecture, and sensitizing concepts guide design rather than prescriptive models.

This approach connects naturally to the broader CSCW and Socio-Technical Systems traditions already represented in CollabAtlas.

Recurring themes

Several themes from PILOT discussions resonate with well-known CSCW challenges:

  • Governance: Who enters information? Who validates it? Who maintains the repository after the project ends? PILOT explores editorial board models, tiered contribution rights, and community stewardship.
  • Sustainability: The project envisions the repository as a portal rather than a monolith — pointing to established platforms like Recherche Data Gouv for data, HAL for publications, and Software Heritage for code.
  • Adoption resistance: Fieldwork across civil security, education, and publishing reveals recurring patterns: users often do not use all available features, resist new tools, or lack awareness of their existing tools’ capabilities.
  • Organizational context: Status, job security, and organizational culture all shape willingness to collaborate — a finding that echoes decades of CSCW research.

Further reading

Three key references from the PILOT consortium deepen the practice-based computing foundations: Li et al. (2021) on value tensions in documenting design cases, Randall et al. (2018) on self-reflectivity in design research, and Wulf et al. (2015) on empirically grounded conceptualizations from design case studies.