At people's level

• Lack of time : to handle the tools, to use them
• Fear of other people's opinion, of judgement (from peers), of being ridiculous
• Problem with writing, with the language
• Disconnection with real life (too virtual, which person(s) and which project(s) are behind the tool ?
• Difficulty to change one's practices to adopt those of the group (resistance to change)
• Problems of copyrights, intellectual property, fear that information might be stolen, Fear of losing power by sharing information.
• Difficulty in handling tools, technical fear :
  • fear of difficulty
  • fear with web tools
  • computer = complicated
  • heterogeneousness of the group with the handling of tools.
• A difficult access to internet :
  • slow connection
  • obsolete software
• Difficulty to get logged in :
  • loss of the password
  • loss of the web address
• Lack of motivation for the project, members don't make the link with their own personal interests :
  • fear of misunderstanding messages
  • habit of a centralized working
  • institutional environment

At tools level

• Fear of tools, of difficulty, of an not enough ergonomic interface : the computer is a problem.
• Equipment, obsolete connexion
• Protection, identification.
• Not adapted needs.
• An implementation that is not progressive enough, that doesn't take sufficiently into account the different stages of the group's life.
• Difficulty to translate texts with emotion and hidden meaning.
• Several tools for the same use.
• Need for a paper base, for concrete.
• Complicated Tools.
• One can't find how to participate.
• An evolution of tools that goes too fast (displays, features).

At facilitator's level

• Too many requests (urgent ! To validate, misled question).
• Omnipresence or absence of the facilitator.
• Messages too long, too many items of information , not enough transparency.
• Founder = gravedigger.
• Employee : the financing of the job overrides on the network's objectives.
• Not enough listening of the group's needs.
• The facilitator does himself instead of making do.
• Mixing up in the roles : management, leadership, facilitator.

At project level

• Ethical drift, risk of rupture.
• Institutional representation ( Fear of losing power by sharing information.).
• Demobbing : bad apprehension of involvement.
• Difficulty in perceiving concretely the projects, its results.
• Relevance of the project.
• Vocabulary : level of the shared jargon ?
• Complexity : members can't see the entirety of the project any more.
• Level of involvement that is too high.
• Lack of visibility: of the time required, of the project's interest, of its purpose.
• No facilitator.
• No tracks of the project's story.

The time

• Lack of time :
  • for the handling of tools
  • for the involvement in the project.
• Different rhythms: employees / volunteers.

Before the meeting

During the meeting

After the meeting

• In 2009, the Prufock Café in London created an “unloyalty card”. Customers had to go for a coffee at cafés from the competition and show their card to get it stamped. Once the card was full, customers could go back to the Prufock Café where they were given a free coffee. The goal was to retain customers of the Prufock Café by showing them that they served the best coffee, but also to force the managers of other cafés to guarantee the quality of their coffee, since they know they face competition. This also allowed bringing a stream of new customers. Ultimately, however, the main goal shared by all was to find a creative answer to the expansion of Starbucks cafés.
• Fiat and PSA created a joint subsidiary that manufactured commercial vehicles of both brands, allowing scale savings by using the same components.

• The field of the environment is very often convergent. For example, collaboration between the NASA and the ESA (in a context of strong competition) regarding environmental issues: managing space waste, the life cycle of satellites and the impact that launching spacecrafts has on biodiversity. This cooperation takes the shape of exchanges between specialists and a joint creation of new materials that are more environmentally friendly (to replace those that were going to be banned since they were too harmful)
• Green X Change is a platform created by Nike, Creative Commons and Best Buy to share research. Anyone who is interested can put their innovations on this platform by choosing a licence that draws inspiration from free software and that allows other companies to benefit from the invention. This licence allows the owner of an innovation to choose who can have the rights. The idea behind this is to allow companies in different industries that do not compete against each other to share the fruits of their R&D. This platform is finding it difficult to expand outside its founding companies, but its authors see in it a huge potential driver of extending radical cooperation.

• A high level of reciprocal interaction between the members that is nurtured by frequent exchanges
• Taking into account the different points of view and giving value to the contributions of each member to the community, and encourage them all to participate while remembering this sentence by Paul Ricoeur "Tolerance is not a concession I make to the other, it is about recognizing the principle that a part of truth escapes me."
• That the facilitator is capable to regulate social and affective conflicts arising from different ideas and natures.

• to allow each member to perceive an idea, re-think it from a different perspective and thus make his or her point of view on that idea evolve;
• to avoid any censorship on new ideas that arise in a group;
• to create a favourable climate for exchange and creativity, favouring freedom of speech;
• to solve problems in a collaborative way;
• to offer a global vision and go deeper into the situation;

• The White hat represents neutrality. The person wearing it must simply announce the facts leaving all possible interpretations aside.
• The Red hat represents emotions. The person can freely express his or her feelings and intuitions.
• The Green hat means creativity. The person wearing it looks for alternatives, while trying to consider the problem from a different perspective.
• The Yellow hat represents constructive criticism. The person "admits their craziest ideas and dreams".
• The Black hat means negative criticism, judging. The person wearing this hat announces the weaknesses and the risks entailed by this idea.
• The Blue hat represents organization, channelling the ideas and process. The person will look at the expressed idea from a distance.

• One member starts by writing an article which is then modified and added to by another member, and so forth until a “document” that is deemed complete by the whole group and that generates consensus is drafted.
• An approach that is more cooperative than collaborative is when each of the members works on a part of the article. Then the different parts of the document are linked to one another and harmonised to constitute a single and coherent article.

• Finally, the most collaborative approach is maybe one that includes all members in thinking about how they are going to write the article; one where there is no real distinction between roles. Each member participates in all the different phases. We will analyse the elaboration phases that could cover this last point.

1. Generating "an irreversible cooperative experience"

2. Brainstorming

3. Drafting

• the web becomes a social media, even citizen where everyone can be author (Wikipedia).
• Production of web contents is democratized thanks to the development of technologies: blogs, wikis, podcasts, photos and digital videos, etc), to the wide diffusion of broadband and to the emergence of a new generation of internet users native of the digital technology.

• between applications (inter-operability, applications combinations...): calendars, maps...
• between medium (computers, telephony, audio reader, video, Internet), with the advent of teh web as main channel.

Opportunities :

• Mobility and portability and hence an increased flexibility for users which have access anywhere and anytime.
• An increased motivation of at least part of the trainees, particularly the youngest, leading maybe to more persevering.
• The trainee as a producer of learning contents, and thus a more visible apprenticeship leading to an improvement of his taking over of the matter, of his autonomy and of his getting a sense of responsability.
• Numerous possibilities of cooperation, of socialization and exchanges and thus of apprenticeship of collaboration and team work so much for the students than for the trainers and institutions.
• Theexpression under various forms, including multimédia, allowing a personalization and a suppport to different styles of apprenticeship.
• Theease and speed of the information's dissemination at very low cost, independent of distance, increasing its impact.
• The multiplicity ou pervasiveness of tools being able to bear all the aspects of an educational experience.
• Awide access to contents, to experts and trainings, constituting a factor of levelling out, in particular between regions.
• New possibilities of organizing information and of creation of metadata.
• An opportunity of apprenticeship of the use of media and ICT tools and of information literacy, transferable to other contexts.
• Anopportunity of educational innovation, of widening to new approaches and organizational innovation, among other more personalized and contextualized learnings.

Challenges :

• The need for teachers and institutions to share their power and supervision. An evaluation of authority towards transparency, from expert to facilitator, from presentation to participation.
• The support to motivation and participation necessary to the evolution of the trainee's role from passive listener to active and creative participant.
• A need for apprenticeship of numerous information literacies : use of technologies, informational skills, management of digital identity, etc.
• Questions linked to intellectual property and to evolution in contents of producing practices and works (assemblies, cooperations, etc).
• The management of immediacy of communications and fast evolution of social softwares.
• Risks linked to safety of information on the Web and to cybercrime.
• Choice of tools and of their integration to institutional systems or not.

Motivation and participation support

• evaluation of participation : it's more a forced choice to participate than a deliberate one. It is also a risk of a minimal participation aiming only at the infringement of the evaluation's criteria. Contrary to the preconceived ideas according to which the pupils will make only the works which will formally be estimated, the absence of stiff constraints (relative to the blog e.g.) incites the pupils to blog even more. The dosage between constraint and freedom is to be found.
• wide broadcasting of the contributions : opening gives visibility, pride and allows the reuse. It is thus generally seen as a factor of motivation. This practice is systematically used in Animacoop's trainings. The trainees produce diffusable contents. It is a more binding but also more appreciated work. (e.g.: http://animacoop.net/wakka.php?wiki=ContenusProduits).

Individual, collaborative or cooperative paths

• accomplishment,
• reasoning of higher level,
• gain of working time,
• transfer of learning,
• motivation for achievement,
• intrinsic and continuous motivation,
• social and cognitive development,
• interpersonal attraction,
• social support, friendships,
• reduction of stereotypes and prejudices,
• valuing differences,
• psychological health, self-esteem,
• social skills,
• internalization of values,
• quality of the learning environment ... and many others.

A more personalized apprenticeship and environment

Active educations and more contextualized apprenticeship

Multimedia contents

• The use of blog : it allows to leave tracks of one's apprenticeships and is excellent in the practices of formative assesment.
• Wiki shows the contributions of each member to a collaborative work.
• Vidéo and video conference enable to assess the spoken expression or the content's appropriation. We can also build on existing content, e.g. evaluate or complete an article on a wiki.

The use of appropriate tools

Support

• the need to establish, from the beginning, slots of availability,
• the collaborative work. The supervision was assumed in team of four trainers : "This way of working favors students who receive instant answers as well as trainers who share the task of answering emails".