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Reciprocal expertiseFranois Deck

To cite this Article Deck, Franois(2004) 'Reciprocal expertise', Third Text, 18: 6, 617 632 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/0952882042000285023 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0952882042000285023

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Third Text, Vol. 18, Issue 6, 2004, 617632

Reciprocal ExpertiseFranois DeckDownloaded By: [Middlesex University] At: 20:21 21 September 2010

The following presentation will focus on reciprocal transfers between art and other practices. Though such transfers generally mobilise skills or competencies, in the following, social practices will be acculturated with an aesthetics of decision-making, and I will consider a number of different projects where notions of deliberation and decision-making were at [email protected] FranoisDeck 0 600000November 18 2004 & Francis Original Article Ltd Third and 10.1080/0952882042000285023 CTTE100164.sgm Ltd TaylorText Francis2004

AESTHETICS OF DECISION-MAKINGThe specific way that artistic activities deploy a future horizon as an inherent condition of the present itself implies that the artist takes responsibility for the succession of decisions inscribed in his or her work. This notion of artwork intricately intertwines the public with the biographical. Can this intertwining of historicised subjectivity with public responsibility be considered a model for the subject and for democratic practice? How do the respective roles of decision-maker and public mesh together? Should politicians not lay bare the subjective components of their decisions? Is the subjective dimension of citizenship adequately taken into account in the political process? Is the artist a mere figure of consolation in the skewed distribution of decision-making roles? Without resolving these questions, one might argue that decisionmaking practices, along with the role of the experts who make the decisions, need to be questioned, if only because every choice whether concerning bio-technologies or environmental issues entails something more than mere expertise. Whether in the realms of art or democracy, the issue of a public possessing the means of analysis running counter to previously agreed values becomes crucial. If it is possible to transform this reflexive feedback into a key moment in the process of artistic conception itself, the essential issue of art then becomes the production of tools that can be used by the public. In this perspective, it becomes a question of the externalisation of artistic practices, and the recognition of the public and the artist as co-producers of the public sphere. Such are the broad lines of what I understand as an aesthetics of decisionmaking.1Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online 2004 Kala Press/Black Umbrella http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/0952882042000285023

1. These issues are discussed in my essay, Esthtique de la dcision, in EspacesTemps, nos 7879, 2002, pp 99108.

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The concept of externalisation sheds some light on what is at play in this transformation of the figure of artistic activity. The idea of an externalisation of artistic practices can in fact be understood from the perspective of the model of externalisation of production in the industrial sector. From a structural point of view, industrial externalisation means that a given resource, essential to the production of surplus value, is not factored into production costs. Conversely, the resource when it concerns human beings can exempt itself from, or behave in such a way that it eludes, cost analysis. This is what can be seen to be taking place in artistic practices when one examines the transformation of the context of art production today, most particularly in France over the past twenty years. During this period, new art centres were opened as the result of deliberate policy decisions implemented in the visual-arts field. Official reference to the notion of contemporary art obviously drew a demarcation line between legitimate practices and illegitimate practices. Consequently, one notices a sort of reversal of initiative, to the extent that it is henceforth the institution itself, upheld by public policy, that has adopted a vanguard position. Previously, of course, the public and the artistic landscape were largely restricted to values benchmarked against a national or even regional scale. These new public policy initiatives have been implemented through the unprecedented development of cultural mediation. Subsequently, a whole host of new actors have sought to carve out their niche between the artist and the public. Mediation has taken on a crucial role in the production and dissemination of art. Mediation has on some occasions played a leading role in conceiving exhibitions, whereas artists have been downgraded to producing pieces. Curators combine and stage individual components in conceptual and spatial installations, which are self-realising artworks. It seems that today, notwithstanding the abundant debate this phenomenon has engendered (Robert Smithson, Daniel Buren, and so on), all the consequences of these changes have not been fully examined. The market/museum system, following postindustrial society itself, externalises many activities that are useful and even fundamental to its functioning, reducing them to unaccounted-for activities. Not all productive activity preceding actual integration into the market-museum system of production and delivery is taken into account. If this integration takes place at all, actual creation time is taken into account, economically speaking, only when the work is sold. The activity deployed in the realisation of an installation because it is relatively non-negotiable is usually taken into account only in terms of the reimbursement of actual expenditures. Thus a site-specific installation, produced for a specific space, can only be purchased in the rare instance of a public commission. Which is why artistic activity as such is generally considered to be free. The art system feeds on what can be referred to as individual patronage, which requires that artists have recourse to day jobs, or access to social funds in order to survive. At the same time, French law protects artistic works on the condition that they be materialised in the form of an object, and that they be original. Notions regarding the materialisation and the originality of the artwork have been sorely put to the test recently, particularly in the digital realm, where artistic activity is expanding rapidly. This activity, in

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the current legal and economic frameworks with regard to art, cannot therefore be factored into production costs. For this reason, it can be argued that a whole set of artistic practices is now being externalised. The externalisation of artistic practices, outside of a real economic circuit, constitutes a reservoir of free innovation. This is borne out by the example of the Brise-Glace in Grenoble, an artists squat that shifted from a situation of illegality to a tolerated position, before becoming a site that the city council regularly shows off to visitors as one of the citys important cultural venues, despite the fact that most of the innovators continue to live on welfare. In a context where information exchanges have become an essential dimension of the development of value, the externalisation of artistic practice is liable to be reinterpreted as a form of freedom. Cooperative

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exchange networks, Internet discussion lists, squats, artists collectives, and associative spaces all bear this out. Economic scarcity has brought with it a paradoxical phenomenon: a disintegration of the social fabric, which is nevertheless accompanied by phenomena of re-urbanisation in the case of autonomous projects. An artists squat is liable to develop a network of people who, until then, had remained on the margins of the available cultural facilities. It can also be argued that the shift from the role of spectator to that of actor is far easier to achieve in a squat than in a traditional cultural establishment. Many of these self-run spaces, where debate and collective decision-making are customary, may be seen as small-scale models of democratic society. Current conditions of modes of exchange have led to a reorganisation of artistic activity, allowing new issues to emerge, including those regarding the focal points of new capacities for initiatives. This phenomenon, which it is important to take into account in the renewal of artistic activity and the opening up of new prospects, corresponds to the transformation of modes of production of value, in terms of both the exchange of goods and the service economy. The dematerialisation of art is, of course, nothing new. Conceptual art pointed the way. What has changed today, above and beyond art, is the generalised dematerialisation of the economy and the decline of the value of productive labour. Art is now able now to move concretely into spaces that had previously been considered outside all artistic legitimacy. Principles of action, which may have had a utopian character some thirty or forty years ago for instance, attitudes as forms, process-based or concept-based art, installation or situation art can today be reinterpreted as operative modes of the real. The artist equipped with a mobile telephone and a portable computer is an off-site labourer. Potentially, art can happen anywhere. The experience of art can constitute a model for complex contemporary activities: the production of intelligibility is not linked to any prescribed finality. Perceptive competencies, specific to the artistic realm, thus enter into congruency with the development of a multimedia, multimodal world. With their common tools, the transversality of networks and the general transformation of activities, the public and the artist are potentially co-producers of the public sphere. With the current self-externalisation of an ever-increasing number of artistic practices, questions arise as to arts use-value and operative value in unprotected spaces. Questions of this kind concern both urban practices and net-based practices, in which the public is no longer situated downstream but is already present within the artistic experience itself. The first space thus constituted is moreover that of information exchange and debate between the public and the artists. However, in this space, a number of different traditions and different cultures are at work. The need to exchange values in the course of the form-production process, complicating the exercise of art, also enriches it through the introduction of new differences. Art no longer has to seek out a public inasmuch as the latter is the necessary condition of the realisation of the exercise itself. The public sphere is no longer merely to come. It is already constitutive of the works conception process. And it reconstitutes it continuously. The potential diversity in terms of how participants interact fosters the implementation of competencies and opens up the project to new

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perspectives. Under such conditions, information exchanges between people enrich the knowledge of everyone individually, whereas the global competency of a group increases beyond the mere juxtaposition of forms of knowledge and abilities. Rather than reducing the singular to the collective, it is interesting to conceive the development of the collective in reciprocity with the development of the autonomy of each individual. But art must also prove the consistency of its own specific tradition with respect to innovation in other fields particularly free or opensource software design. In keeping with open-source logic, freeware computer programs can be improved by their users. Experience has shown that this movement integrating users feedback and reflection regarding the softwares conception makes it possible to perfect a system more quickly. In effect, users easily notice bugs and point them out to the designers. If they have programming skills themselves, they can intervene directly on the source code, and propose their version of the programme. A licensing system constitutes a good-conduct code. The latter makes it possible to systematically identify by name the previous designers, and to add a name thereby accurately acknowledging a contribution. As a version of jointly developed software is distributed, its primary authors reputations grow. The sharing of details of conception in the elaboration of free software highlights the way in which the distribution of a culture of decision-making has become an essential issue. The rhythm of the city, in interaction with numeric space, is set by different agendas. The mirror of the virtualisation of exchanges, the project is developed around meetings, seminars, debates, and forums. These meetings, generally exerting a pressure to attain certain objectives, overlook the very protocols which regulate them and that over-determine their effects. The culturally constructed procedures of deliberation and decision-making are in fact naturalised to the benefit of the status quo. These modalities deserve to be examined for what they are. The space of the debate supposes certain concrete presences, which are deployed in specific spaces. Speech is implied in the bodies that conjure up a stage: tone of voice, audacity, timidity, annoyance, complicity, seduction, suspicion, aggressiveness, laughter, boredom, pleasure, and so on. The quality of an environment, how close the chairs are placed to one another, the direction they are facing, the warmth or coldness of the site, as well as its acoustics, all influence exchange. The distribution of locations and roles determines the specific modes of circulation of speech. Discursive space is highly plastic. Deliberation, for instance, involves a certain number of attitudes: it places value on negotiation rather than on taking power, on the quest for hypotheses beyond the mere expression of opinion, on translation abilities rather than the abstruseness of discourses, on the circulation of information rather than its retention. What are the rules of the game? Who gives whom the floor? What is the sequence of the different timeframes of expression and how is it arrived at? The way in which the information stemming from these exchanges is processed and the means used will orient the decisional consequences of the deliberation. Access to user-friendly, shareable, and transmissible tools becomes both an aesthetic and an ethical question. The function of these tools, technically formalised, is to throw into question the attractors of meaning and the

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geometry of the bifurcations in which the debate unfolds its stakes and issues. The tools of deliberation are highly plastic. Decision-making represents the horizon of deliberation. Therefore, the modalities of deliberation include, in fine, the stakes and issues that will determine the decision-making process and the actual decisions made. To that end, the space, the protocols of verbal exchange, and also the media for processing the information are far more open-ended than usage suggests. These multiple dimensions can become the site of aesthetic investigations. The decision-making process is highly plastic. These theoretical reflections all emerged from practical experiences, which I will now flesh out by describing several projects. Following an activity based on a site-specific practice, in 1992 I made the following decisions: Downloaded By: [Middlesex University] At: 20:21 21 September 2010

the conception process includes partners not referenced in the field of art the works destination is the works situation the shared work identifies no art object

DISCRETE SPACEBetween 1992 and 1994, I developed a series of chantiers entre deux personnes (two-person worksites) with interlocutors coming from a wide variety of social and professional backgrounds: farming, medicine, mining, prisons, and so on. These meetings were initiated by conversations regarding how individuals construe their particular experience of space. The purpose of the subsequent sessions was to identify the specific interest of a particular worksite. The title discrete space stemmed from conversations with two scientists: Christian Cibert, a biochemist, and Damien Schovaert, a geneticist. A discrete space is a space built on points of intersection, where the intermediary spaces remain empty. From these two scientists, I learned that by adding new prerequisites to the four dimensions of space adding, say, the colour green it is possible to work with a five-dimensional, or even a twelve-dimensional space, simply by adding the required number of additional parameters. I also learned that the notion of freedom was used in mathematics. Space, in short, is not a given; it is a construct. The fact that space can be constructed gives potential above and beyond what is established as a legitimate space to new ways of conceiving a strategy of freedom. I should also mention my conversations with Marian Musial, a miner subsequently reskilled in boilermaking after the closure of the coal pits. Marian, who was also an active amateur photographer, told me about the cutbacks in the workforce in his factory and the growing list of skills and competencies required by any single operative. And for precisely that reason, Marian was annoyed that so little heed was paid to the proposal-making capacities of workers and citizens with regard to how the workplace and social life in general was organised. As he said to me: weve got the ideas, why dont they listen to us? It was thus that we came up with the notion of idea banks. These idea banks would later reemerge in my work in the form of question banks.

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Whenever a conversation with an interlocutor seemed ready, an audiocassette was recorded, entitled with the date, time, and location, and signed with the name of both co-authors. This was done in order to emphasise that what was at stake in the work was the conversation itself. The cassettes status is purely documentary; they can be consulted and duplicated free of charge at the Maison de lArt et de la Communication de Sallaumines (in the north of France) where I was in residency during the second year of the project. When the time came to publish the results, I laid out a series of formal constraints, which I mention here only because of their influence on my subsequent work. From the cassettes, I excerpted sequences of words, which provided a sort of image of each worksite. These sequences were never to be longer than a single line using a fourteenpoint font size. The different worksites were then joined together, one after the other, in chronological order. More than a text, the result was a sort of film, bringing different worlds into contact with one another. In this film, my own words are indistinguishable from those of my interlocutors. The cover of this publication includes a generic of co-authors in alphabetical order. My name appears in the list without any particular distinction.

RECIPROCAL EXPERTISEI now want to discuss the notion of reciprocal expertise, which I have chosen as my essays title. The notion of competency is a transversal signifier for my activities as a whole. This signifier nevertheless encounters a certain number of limits given the uncertainties of our contemporary world. The artistic approach to decision-making, however, maintains a specific familiarity with incertitude even as it develops a more complex attitude toward competency. An artistic experience of negotiation between competency and incompetency constitutes a factor for promoting the autonomy of a weakened general signifier. From this point of view, I decided, whenever possible, to introduce the notion of reciprocal expertise into all interaction between different operators:Bs competencies enrich As competencies if Cs incompetencies enrich Bs competencies then Cs incompetencies change polarity and move to a higher order

QUESTION BANKS, 1995The question banks project emerged in 1995. Amongst its determinants, I have already mentioned my conversations with Marian Musial. Going back over numerous interviews, listening to the sequences of words in keeping with specific constraints, turned out to be an essential experience of condensation. And I think it is fair in this case to refer to the plasticity of the listening experience. At the same time, I had a number of conversations with George Goyet, a consulting engineer involved in research-action in the field of territorial

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development. As I explained my ongoing question banks project to him, he told me that he would sometimes say to his interlocutors: How much are you paying me for that question? Prior to any decision-making process, there is a way of raising questions that is determinant for the selection of the problem. The question thus has its own particular value: formulating a question involves decision-making the question itself entails condensing thought questioning oneself suspends precipitous resolution of truth and falsehood

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After identifying these qualities, I began to put together collections of questions in different situations. I then resubmitted to my interlocutors thematic lists, organised by keywords. By way of example, let me just mention my participation in 1996 in a seminar workgroup, involving industrialists, academics, and social actors. The seminar focusing on the question of work was of interest to me because it enabled me to test whether and to what extent my points of view were acceptable outside an art-specific milieu. Concretely, it was an occasion to have one of my very first question banks (concerning The Evolution of Representations of Labour) approved and validated by a collective group.

STATES OF BECOMINGStates of Becoming was a three-day forum organised in Paris in November 1996, at the initiative of a journal called Les priphriques vous parlent (The peripheries are speaking to you). This meeting, which brought together both social and artistic actors, was an upshot of the social movements that shook France in 1995. The debates were organised in keeping with two modalities: general assemblies, where participants were seated in a large circle with an empty centre, which those wishing to speak were free to occupy; and some fifteen thematic workshops. At the beginning of the forum, while the modalities of the debate were being discussed, I proposed that the participants in the workshops be allowed to write up questions individually, which I would record as we went along. The following day, graphic enlargements enabled a slightly different public to become aware of the questions that the participants had raised individually as well as the synthesised summaries written up by the reporters. It was thus possible to consult condensed versions of the participants own words. The hegemonic claim of synthesis that is, its ability to produce jointly held and common opinion needs to be thrown into question. Who is doing the synthesising? And with what presuppositions? Can the creativity of a collective be reduced to a consensus? Why erase the subjective expression from the memory of collective experience?

DEBATE PROTOCOLIt was at this time that I began to develop protocol for debate. The objective was to formalise, technically speaking, the notion of reciprocal

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expertise. The point was to treat debate as if it were a situation of collective performance. I therefore developed a sort of party game based on using a book of detachable coupons. Each coupon was intended to receive a question that could then be recopied for reference on the corresponding stub. The protocols general principle is as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4. Questions are written on coupons. The coupons are shuffled, cut and dealt out. The first person to speak is drawn by lot. The participants intervene on the basis of the questions they have received. 5. New questions are formulated. 6. After several games, those questions deemed most interesting are validated.Downloaded By: [Middlesex University] At: 20:21 21 September 2010

TOOLS FOR DEBATEAbove and beyond any particular situation, a generic process began to emerge. It can be defined as follows: ]question bank & + if[ develops tools for debate. Protocol for inquiry and decision-making triggers situations of reciprocal expertise. And more if affinity. This set-up has been tried out in a wide variety of situations and projects. It has been taken up and appropriated by collectives in squats during consultation sessions with elected officials. It was one of the tools used by copyleft attitude, bringing contemporary art into conjunction with the open source and free software model. It was also used in conjunction with an urban renewal project, etc. Above and beyond these situations and projects, the process has proved able to gain its own autonomy. Participants frequently take up and reuse the procedures put forward in different frameworks.

VALUES OF ARTAn approach consciously developed for the social sphere cannot simply be imported into a museum context. Yet, in so far as the work develops an aesthetic debate, I find it worthwhile to evaluate the conditions of this participation. In the context of my project, the condition sine qua non for any collaboration with an art-specific site is that it be able to host actors with no pedigree in the field of art as full-fledged, active, and critical participants. It was precisely the development of this sort of tension that was developed in the framework of the exhibition Traverses, organised by Laurence Boss and Hans Ulrich Obrist at the Paris Museum of Modern Art in 2001. The basic exhibition game rule was that each invited guest be allowed to solicit someone else whose work was in keeping with his or her work. Brian Holmes having invited me to take part, we set into play a collective thought process initiated by issue 17 of the Paris-based journal Mouvements coordinated by Stephen Wright, and entitled Values of Art: what spaces for art beyond the purview of the market and the institution?

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The issue itself included interviews and essays by some twenty contributors, working in the field of art or the social sciences. To begin, we sent books of coupons to the authors who had contributed to the journal, suggesting that they formulate questions regarding the other authors texts. The authors were subsequently invited to attend a meeting where a question bank was established, whose information opened the way to a new landscape. Subsequent meetings were held with the goal of defining the modalities of a public debate in the framework of the museum. The collective, made up of both artists and non-artists, produced a sound installation and a series of postcards to be used as tools in the debate. By way of illustration, here are three of the phrases reproduced in the sound installation and on the postcards: Downloaded By: [Middlesex University] At: 20:21 21 September 2010

Contemporary art: a start-up scheme for new entertainment industries? Artist-run squats: the cutting edge of neo-liberal job insecurity, or a new art of living? Whats a viewer: A receiver? A receptacle? A recipient? A receipt? An artwork?

These elements provided the backdrop to the debate entitled When Contemporary Art Exposes itself to Public Debate. The three-part discussion was initiated by invited guests: TMark Corporate Consulting with regard to art as process; Jrme Poret (from Emmetrop in Bourges) and Eric Corne (initiator of the Plateau in Paris), regarding the question of emerging spaces; and Pascal Nicolas Le Strat with regard to the democratisation of cultural policy. Several months later, the process was renewed at the invitation of the Passerelle Art Centre, a non-institutional art space in Brest, interested in concretely throwing into question its future orientations through a public debate.

THE 2KOISMELTHONIn June 2001, one of the people taking part in Chantier Public, for which I had devised the project to accompany the worksite for the renovation of the Cargo (a cultural centre in Grenoble), contacted me in his capacity as an urban planner. Serge Bossini proposed that I work with the Grenoble Urban Planning Agency, of which he is the associate director. The Agency is an organisation employing some sixty people, focusing on a territory of some 150 communes. After some discussion, the Agency commissioned me to conceive of and organise a process questioning both the Agencys mission, and the tools and tasks of urban planners. The project culminated in the process known as Impertinent Territories, and a day-long forum held in February 2002. A group of some thirty people, most of whom were from outside the professional world of urban planning, met on a dozen occasions for discussions informed by my proposal that forms always be discussed simultaneously with questions of content. The first two sessions were managed on the basis of the procedures laid out in ]question banks & + if[. In the course of the second session,

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someone suggested we delocalise our sessions to different sites in the city and its suburbs. And so, in subsequent sessions, we moved from a squat to an academic research institute to a collective housing co-op. Following each session, I pored over and reconstructed the information that had been produced, compiling it in such a way as to draw attention to the plasticity of the most singular elements. In the course of the third session, the participants suggested we modify the protocol, replacing the questions by proposals. Twelve proposals thus came to make up the first elements of a new deck of cards. They included: Downloaded By: [Middlesex University] At: 20:21 21 September 2010

Collective interest, an authoritarian decision Urban planning in wastelands, fallow lands and the lands of culture Introduce the spiritual into art, Africa into the computer, a speck of sand into the gearbox

Twelve cards for writing up questions, and twelve others for writing up proposals, were subsequently added to the deck. It became 2koismelthon, in which a method of the day invites users to reinvent the game itself. The authors subsequently devised a scenario for the forum Impertinent Territories, in which they played a leading role.

CONSULTANTThe work processes I have been describing all deal with the potentiality of a double validation: within the field of art, and in the space of a social practice. It is important not to start out by confusing these two types of validation. One cannot be transferred to the other. Of course one and the same project can legitimately allow for a plurality of narratives and to legitimisations in specific fields in art or urban planning, for instance. There are those who will merely, according to the place they occupy, verify the interest of a displacement carried out in one field or the other. On the other hand, the perspective of a double validation makes it possible, by increasing the play of constraints, to elaborate new constructive differences. The sought-after tension is in effect to determine the conditions of possibility under which these validations can be seen to coincide, thereby advancing the hypothesis that a social practice may become a jointly produced work. These projects show that, starting from a position of initiative, my presence progressively dilutes into a collective process. This disappearance favours what is at stake in a work that consists in affecting a process of decision-making rather than merely replacing it with something else. This affectation must be able to be taken up in a narrative which does not belong exclusively to the specific social field in question but to that of aesthetics. If I were to define my activity, I might say that it resembles that of a consultant, who refers to the service model rather than to the trade of goods. The very notion of consultancy implies a reciprocity, both giving and receiving consultation. Aesthetic questions foster an investigation of media and enable the production of artefacts in the exchange of information. The use-value of art is presented as an alternative to the

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speculative values of the market. The service model describes here a certain immaterial system of trade in which the commissioning sponsor replaces the client. This particular type of consultant is not simply responsible for the operational quality of a service; he/she provokes a shift in the demand through intentions that did not initially belong to the commissioning sponsors field of reference. Turning the client into a commissioning sponsor is the result of a negotiation that introduces aesthetic questions into the project of mediation. The consulting artist intervenes in the field of project management, providing decision-making support by negotiating his competencies and incompetencies in the mode of reciprocal expertise. Translated from French by Stephen Wright50decision-quest.ENG scenario.ENG eclat.ENG opensource.ENG roundtable.ENG

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