Fostering rural actors' empowerment through “multi-viewpoints” methods and ICT tools

As a part of a project exploring ways to define transition to Territorial AgroEcological System (tTAES), researchers and rural stakeholders (policymakers and farmers) organized territorial participatory design (TPD) workshops. Such TPD workshops are especially challenging since actors projecting their activity into the future confront many viewpoints or controversial dimensions (farming systems, natural resources, food-chain…). Multiple viewpoints in TPDs foster participation and empowerment of rural actors, especially weak actors whose language and semantic get away from prevailing or expert perspectives. In this “work in progress” paper, we propose a multi-viewpoints model for both organization and knowledge purposes in tTAES workshops. It allows for adequate organization of activities and agendas and also supports knowledge sharing, capitalizing, annotating and category-building with respect to the plurality of semantics of the actors. First we experienced the method with rural actors in face-to-face meetings using classical maps and paper devices. Then we propose guidelines for viewpoints-based software tools for audiorecording/tagging of TPD meetings material, annotation, knowledge sharing on the Web and cross-viewpoints visualization all along the TPD process.