With “Recommendations-collaboratives” (collaborative recommendations), the French government showcases how open source solutions can support territorial and public infrastructure management, highlighting the strong bridge between digital and offline public goods.
Recommendations-collaboratives
Recommendations-collaboratives was launched by the French government in 2021 and accelerated its development throughout 2023-2024. Driven by Accélérema, a public body under supervision of the Ministry of Ecological Transition and Territorial Cohesion, the Recommendations-collaboratives solution uses open source to provide a simple way for local authorities throughout France to connect with experts on issues related to territorial management, including urban planning and public infrastructure maintenance.
Simply put, Recommendations-collaborative offers public service actors and their partners the possibility to launch an online advisory platform focused on a specific thematic linked to territorial management. The platform can then be tailored to the specific needs of different territorial management and public infrastructure projects, allowing easier connections between local authorities and experts on specific issues. The solution is backed-up by the Recommendations-collaborative team, which also offers free support to public services users in developing a platform adapted to their needs.
With this simple solution to a problem encountered by many local authorities in managing urban planning projects, Recommendations-collaboratives demonstrate how open source products can support the maintenance of public infrastructure, creating a bridge between online and offline public goods.
Recommendations-collaborative was first launched in 2020 for the UrbanVitaliz project, supporting local authorities with the re-purposing of urban wastelands. Building on the success of this first project, and to meet the needs of small and medium local authorities, recommendations-collaborative is also being used for two other urban planning projects, including SOS Ponts, see below, and another project on eco-districts certification. The source code of the standard platform is available on GitHub and was published under AGPL-3.0 licence.
Focus on: SOS Ponts
The SOS Ponts (“SOS Bridges”) project was launched through Recommendations-collaborative in 2023 to support small local authorities with the maintenance and safety of public infrastructure, specifically bridges.
The development of SOS bridges is a follow-up to the National Bridges Programme (2020), which mapped out public infrastructure bridges across France’s small municipalities (5,000 residents and less). The programme offered local authorities a free mapping and evaluation of their public infrastructure, resulting in 42,000 “health reports” for bridges across the country. The National Bridges Programme was itself the result of a 2019 report from the French Senate highlighting a lack of proper understanding of architectural heritage and the related safety risks due to under-surveillance and maintenance.
However, the National Bridges Programme was insufficient to effectively respond to the safety risks linked to the under-maintenance of public bridges. This was mostly due to the issue of local municipalities having limited time and resources, as well as lacking the expertise to properly understand the health reports prepared by civil engineers, which negatively impacted the implementation of maintenance programmes.
To support local authorities with the development and implementation of public infrastructure maintenance programme, SOS Ponts used the Recommendations-collaboratives solution to develop a free platform providing public infrastructure guidance in an easy to understand language for non-experts, and connecting local authorities with civil engineer experts to seek guidance on bridge maintenance and to identify concrete actions to take and actors to contact.
Free and built upon an open source solution tailored to their needs, SOS Ponts offers local authorities targeted and operational responses to their public infrastructure maintenance questions.
Featured image: Fabien TWB via Unsplash.