Guide no. 6:

The breakthroughs

    the cartography
    the experience files
    the Web pages
    the electronic forums
    the Proposal Booklets
  the breakthroughs
    the bibliographical files

This brief guide includes:
* a presentation of the Breakthroughs
* a note on the "Formulating breakthroughs in the Proposal Booklets"

Brief practical guides for the Alliance

Guide no. 6:
The breakthoughs

The "breakthroughs" are proposals for strategies and actions that constitute a major break with the past, leading to a structural change in a given milieu or field. They are extracts from the Proposal Booklets written by the Alliance's topical workshops and colleges in 2001.

Objectives:

The Alliance aims to capitalise on methods and reflections in order to identify new forms of action capable of influencing the major challenges facing the contemporary world. During 2000 and 2001, it is using the topical, socioprofessional and geocultural workshops to formulate "proposals for the 21st century" that will result in the publication and diffusion of a collection of Proposal Booklets (cf. Guide no. 5 on the Proposal Booklets).

Regarding the subject of social change, as elsewhere, two types of change must be taken into account:
* adaptive changes that belong to the existing system, but which improve it by correcting negative effects, limiting malfunctioning and accentuating beneficial effects;
* structural changes that call the existing system into question, change the frame of reference and provide an essentially different approach. 

The Proposal Booklets identify strategies for both adaptive and structural change in fields as diverse as financial markets, education, industrial ecology, urban management, fishing, etc.

Against the backdrop of the Proposal Booklets, the Breakthroughs aim more specifically at:

•	identifying the proposals from among those put forward that constitute elements of structural change 

Confronted by the magnitude and complexity of today's challenges, promoting a more responsible and united world involves not only remedying and improving the present system but also radically changing lifestyles and the way our societies are governed. 

Thus the breakthroughs are the quintessence of the Proposal Booklets. For each subject, they highlight the methods and reflections that permit conceiving and implementing the changes necessary. They identify the main proposals, those that are the most innovative and promising.

•	providing a window to the different Proposal Booklets 

The Breakthroughs document is an attractive abstract (about two pages) of the Proposal Booklet that can be easily translated into many languages and widely diffused. Thus it can be used to make the Proposal Booklet known to a wider audience and draw all those who hope to approach the subject dealt with in greater depth. 

Furthermore, all the Breakthroughs will be grouped in a single document that will be used as the preparatory document for the World Assembly at Lille (France) in December 2001. This document will be translated into the seven languages of the Assembly (English, Arab, Chinese, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian) and widely diffused among the Alliance's partners, the media and the general public. It will reflect the remarkable diversity of the subjects dealt with by the Alliance and provide a summary of each of them. Thus it will serve as the introduction to about forty Booklets available on this occasion. 

What to do ?

1/ How to draft the breakthroughs

The challenge of the Breakthroughs is to propose strategies that constitute major advances. Providing a manual on how to achieve this is no mean task but it is possible to suggest a few directions that permit changing value systems and bring innovations to light.

* Observing the margins of the system: changes often appear at the borders of systems, whereas the interests vested in the existing order at the heart of the system are always so strong that they are blind to new realities, preferring to preserve what they hold. Analysis of the margins shows that changes have much more chance of occurring there where the contradictions of prevailing systems are most flagrant. This is to say that attention should be given to what is invented today in "marginal" or dominated groups of the population.

Example: Social money: by setting up barter clubs and using alternative forms of money, populations hard hit for want of monetary resources have been able to find a way out of exclusion and powerlessness. They generate their own activities and consume goods and services that would have been inaccessible in traditional economic circles. Social money does not mean returning to primitive forms of barter, it is a re-interpretation of the social role of money and its use for the common good. It reinvents the market, re-examines the traditional perception of money and contributes to rebuilding social fabric. From being a "marginal 'innovation", it has now reached a critical mass (it concerns more than 10 countries in Latin America and nearly a million people).

* Breaking down false truths: innovations appear when our perceptions of our surroundings, our value systems and mindsets change. We need to break down false truths and situations. The current state of the world is presented as the logical and obvious conclusion of evolution. When one realises that one is heading down a dead-end, the best way out is to return through history to arrive upstream of the process in order to identify its branches, examine the possible options and explore those that were ignored.

Example: The role of local territories: It is generally accepted that globalisation has destroyed the role of local territories. By going back in history, from the 16th to the 18th century in the West, it can be seen that the economy and politics became increasingly structured as territorial links disappeared to the profit of the consumer and citizen, abstract entities akin to isolated cells. Thus, by identifying this major branching away, we cease to perceive the disappearance of local territories as an inevitable occurrence but rather as a historic event that can be dated. Consequently, we are much freer to question current functions and especially those of the future with respect to the territory, so that local territory can become the cornerstone of future governance.

* Transposing approaches to enrich perceptions of problems: Transposing approaches, mechanisms and knowledge from one domain to another can shed new light on problems and lead to innovative solutions. 

Example: Extending the notion of personal bankruptcy to nation-states: Bankruptcy is an old notion in commercial and business law that defines the limits between defaulting on payment – which leads to the ruin of the defaulting company, but also penalises its creditors – and the personal property and freedom of the company boss. This delimitation has not always existed. Not so long ago, a businessman who went bankrupt was automatically imprisoned. The combat against exclusion, at least in Europe, includes the campaign to extend this practice reserved for companies to the notion of civil bankruptcy. It allows over-indebted persons to make a new start. Why not extend this concept of civil bankruptcy to nation-states at international level? 

* Turning the centre and outskirts inside out: This entails removing what is in the centre (since considered primordial, having priority, preponderant, etc.) to the outskirts. On the contrary, what is in the outskirts is removed to the centre. This would permit re-examining the orders of priority and links of causality between the components of a system.

Example: The principle of active subsidiarity: since the beginning of time governance has always been exercised from the centre, for it is here that society is managed on a territorial scale while that which was sent to the marches represented the link between the two scales of the territory. Being sent to the marches means being sent to the non-thought or slightly thought. Today, the principle of reversing the structure of governance amounts to saying that it is the links between different territorial scales which are decisive while the problem of managing a given territory is almost secondary.

* Learning from concrete experiences and exchanging experiences: Using real situations for inspiration enables identifying factors leading to change and observing the impact of seemingly minor innovations. This approach avoids the all too frequent snare of assimilating concrete innovations with adaptive changes on one side and conceptual innovations with structural changes on the other. Moreover, comparing and exchanging experiences makes it possible to shed light on the similarity of certain issues despite the diversity of situations. Comparing real situations makes it possible to identify the problem or question underlying it and adopt several common principles (cf. Guide no. 2 to know more about the experience files).

To obtain a more detailed presentation of directions for formulating breakthroughs and methods to bring about social change, refer to the complementary text Formulating breakthroughs in the Proposal Booklets.

A few additional comments:
* the breakthroughs can be used to identify novel strategies that have already proved their worth and which are based on real experiences in a given field. They can also be limited to identifying the beginning of change, a shiver portending the future.
* There is no necessarily clear border between adaptive and structural changes, or quantitative and quantitative ones. Changes that appear inconsequential or superficial can lead to radical change if one is stubborn enough and if they are diffused and gain general acceptance.
* Appreciating the true value of breakthroughs often requires hindsight.
* In most cases, breakthroughs result from consideration in a given area and directly extracted from a Proposal Booklet. Then comparison with other Proposal Booklets and other analyses may back up the feeling that the breakthrough in question is a major upheaval that will lead to collective  identification of other breakthroughs.

2/ How to present the breakthroughs document 

* On 1 to 2 pages the Breakthroughs document must group the major breakthroughs identified by the workshop or college. It is neither a full list of proposals, or the contents of the Booklet but an abstract presenting the quintessence of the Booklet.

* This document is intended to be both an abstract in the Proposal Booklet and a text that can be used independently, or in a document grouping all the breakthroughs. It must be capable of standing alone.

* It should consist of an introductory paragraph (setting out the context of the workshop, the topic, the work done) and the list of the major breakthroughs identified along with explanations and, if necessary, examples. Wherever possible, the workshop or socioprofessional college must explain why it is a breakthrough and a structural change.

* The Breakthroughs must be finalised in at least 2 languages (in English, French, Spanish or Portuguese) by October15. They will then be translated into the other languages of the Assembly and gathered in a single document grouping all the breakthroughs. This overall document will be sent to the participants of the World Assembly and the media in November. 

Who to ask for support ? 

•	Overall follow-up and co-ordination of the Proposal Booklet collection:
Olivier Petitjean olivier@fph.fr, Michel Sauquet michel@fph.fr, and the other publishers of the booklets

•	Seeking translators:
Juan Carlos Jorquera Lopez juan@echo.org 

•	Breakthrough methodology: 
Vladimir Ugarte vladimir@fph.fr and Pierre Calame pic@fph.fr 

Available resources:

•	Formulating the breakthroughs in the Proposal Booklets, Pierre Calame, November 2000, 8p
•	List of contacts with the collection publishers 

To go further:
•	Horizons for the 21st century: a step towards formulating common horizons within the Alliance for a Responsible and United World, Pierre Calame, September 1999, 16p (cf. p 9-16) – available in French only
•	Seven changes for tomorrow’s world, Pierre Calame, April 2000, 9p – available in French only

Other methodological guides mentioned
•	Guide no. 2 on the experience files 
•	Guide no. 5 on the Proposal Booklets 

14 November 2000

Formulating breakthroughs in the Proposal Booklets ()

Pierre Calame

One of the major difficulties of the proposal booklets is to conceive and give relief to breakthroughs, to radical changes. At first sight, these radical changes upset our perception of common sense. The mind is used to dismissing them out of hand. Brainstorming and creativity are ways of stepping outside common sense, taking the risk of saying something silly, of weightlessness, etc. This difficulty is one of the reasons why large organisations are generally capable of carrying out marginal improvements and optimising resources within predefined scopes, though they are less capable of implementing structural changes. The most radical innovations stem from the inspiration of deviants, people who come from another field or country, daydreamers, etc. This is why innovation in large corporations occurs through the acquisition of external innovations rather than by producing these innovations within. 

How does this apply to the Alliance? Do methods exist that can help us to be individually and collectively creative? I am not sure but I would nonetheless like to propose a few directions by illustrating them when possible via the application of my own approach. The different chapter headings superpose each other to a great extent, but what the matter: an inherent property of the process of creativity is indifference to rational pre-established classifications. Classification will come, though afterwards. 

1.	Transposing approaches from one area to another and from one scale to another  

This approach is often used in the area of scientific innovation and an ally such as André Giordan applies it fairly systematically when he wants to transpose mechanisms detected in the rest of the living world to human beings. He wrote a very good article on this subject in Transversales several years ago, which I recommend. 

I intend to apply this intellectual exercise to the issue of the international debt. 

Justifiably, many NGOs criticise the legitimacy of the debt contracted by the leaders of certain poor countries in the names of their populations and plead for the cancellation or reduction of these debts. It has even become an obvious custard pie for all progressive and third world movements to be flung at their adversaries. However, since these countries must be able to borrow in any case, we turn around in circles. The argument that poor countries should not have to pay their debt because they are poor does not stand up, since its logical conclusion is that no further loans should be made to them at all. Thus the problem must be reformulated, not by asserting the legitimacy of refusing to repay the debt but, as declared by the Financial Monitoring Centre at the Jerusalem meeting, by changing the question round, i.e. Under what conditions is it legitimate for a lender to demand the repayment of a debt? 

Seeing things in this light opens up several new paths, many of which have already been explored: 

a)	Introducing public borrowing in the framework of traditional international law. An international agreement, for example, on a loan made between public authorities, should be subject to international law. This takes us out of the realm of the contract, which defines its own law, between two sovereign states and leads us towards the idea that an international law on contracts exists which must also cover the debt. This initial conceptual opening is required to bring the public debt within the realm of international trade law, which, with mechanisms such as panels of experts and a Court of Law, would create a forum for discussing fair contract conditions and defining the notion of the legitimacy of the debt. 

b)	Taking inspiration from the "enlightened consent" of the beneficiaries. Whether involving scientific experimentation or private loans, the notion of enlightened consent is present. Is the person who signs actually in a situation to comprehend the consequences of his or her act? If we consider that when a government contracts a loan it is in fact the population of the country in question that contracts it, then the question of enlightened consent should lead to the population being asked for its opinion.

c)	Extending the notion of civil bankruptcy. Bankruptcy is an old notion in trade and business law that defines the limits between defaulting on payment – which leads to the ruin of the defaulting company but which also penalises its creditors – and the personal property and freedom of the company boss. This delimitation has not always existed. Not so long ago, a businessman who went bankrupt was automatically imprisoned. The combat against exclusion, at least in Europe, includes the campaign to extend this practice reserved for companies to the notion of civil bankruptcy. It allows over-indebted persons to make a new start. Why not extend this concept of civil bankruptcy to nation-states at international level 

d)	Verify the legitimacy of the assignee. The signature at the bottom of a loan agreement does not bind only he who signs but all those he represents. Therefore in the case of a country, it is not the government but the entire population that pays through the taxes levied from it. In a normal contract, the first step is therefore to verify the legitimacy of the assignee: was he duly authorised to act as signatory? Seen from the viewpoint of international law, this means, for example, that a governmental representative sprung from a coup d'état or a non-democratic regime cannot validly sign a contract and, by consequence, the mandators (the people) cannot be bound by commitments taken on by the assignee with respect to the other contracting authority. This is an obvious principle of the "right of interference". When a bank demands proof of the assignee's legitimacy, it refrains from interfering and limits itself to requesting simple guarantees! This is why, moreover, the Bretton Woods institutions introduced the notion of interference. 

e)	The liability of mandators with respect to their personal property.  In both commercial and non-commercial activities, the assignee not only provides as security the company's equity capital but also his or her personal property. For example, one of the reasons for the advance made by Canadian pension funds towards ethical funds was simply that Canadian law stipulates that the assignee must act in the exclusive interest of their mandators and that they are personally liable. Applied to international law, the consequences can be seen immediately. Far from being an exceptional measure, the right to pursue former governors, representatives of their people when signing a loan agreement, should be a procedure belonging to common law. 

f)	Diversification of the parties liable to be plaintiffs. Once again, the law in many areas has widened the notion of plaintiff. For example, regarding racism or the right to housing, the rule has changed from allowing only those directly prejudiced to be plaintiffs to allowing NGOs to become plaintiffs too. Similarly, it is obvious what this extension could lead to with respect to international law. 

2.	Calling the foundations of the existing order into question 

History can be presented as an itinerary that has branched out in several directions. Designing an industrial process follows the same lines. When a dead-end becomes apparent, the best solution is to return upstream in the process to identify the branches once again to understand why at a given time such and such an itinerary was taken to explore another one. These ramifications are generally buried in the subconscious (since the proof that things should be as they are, is that they are! A classical tautology from the field of social sciences). In strategies for change, this often leads to privileging the change of representation or what the German philosopher, Heidegger, called "changing spectacles". Below are few examples: 

a)	Money. The money of our era fulfils a number of functions (accounting unit, means of exchange, measurement standard, storing wealth) which appear to be indissociably related to each other, since we are so accustomed. Likewise, we feel that using a tool of monetary measurement for exchange represents an advance for humanity, once the limits of bartering physical products is perceived. All books on economics start by explaining this advance. The work we intend to pursue at the Financial Monitoring Centre aims at deconstructing this evidence, to become aware that the tools used for exchange 4,000 years ago were physical symbols of the goods exchanged. This standpoint permits us to call into question all the false truths: the idea that money is the prerogative of public power and the attribute of sovereignty disintegrates when confronted by the propagation of private currencies. The idea that a single standard of value evaporates when confronted by the need to count differently, in terms of the value of property, human labour costs and the non-renewable natural resources used. The calculation tools used by computer networks make it possible to imagine the management of a number of physical flows without the need to use money. The methods of payment do not necessarily include money; monetary reserves that back-up value and the debate that lasted throughout the 19th century on the link between money, gold and silver have fallen into oblivion, etc. 

b)	Territory. The idea that globalisation has destroyed the role of local territories is accepted with almost Biblical reverence. By going back in history, from the 16th to the 18th century in the West, it can be seen that the economy and politics became increasingly structured as territorial links disappeared to the profit of the consumer and citizen, abstract entities akin to isolated cells. Thus by identifying this major branching away, we cease to perceive the disappearance of local territories as an inevitable occurrence, but rather as an historic event that can be dated. Consequently, we are much freer to question currently prevailing functions and especially those of the future with respect to the territory, so that local territory can be made the keystone of future governance. 

c)	Democracy. Democracy is accompanied by a number of unquestioned "truths". I shall give a historic example for France. During the formulation of the laws on decentralisation in 1982-1983, the following syllogism was taken to be obvious: a) "democratic control is ensured by elections which permit sanctioning elected representatives for their management"; b) in order for democratic sanctions to function, electors must know exactly for what an elected representative is responsible; c) to know for what the elected representative is responsible, his or her competence must be both delimited and exclusive from other levels of governance; d) consequently, in order for decentralisation to be democratic, it must be based on "blocks of competence". This syllogism obviously contradicts the fact that, in my opinion, no problem can be solved at only one level of governance. Examination of the philosophy that stemmed from the Greek city (the city as territory surrounded by enemies) and then from the foundations of democracy in the 18th century, leads us to question the truth of this syllogism. Thus we look to another philosophy according to which citizens are capable of understanding that the competency of the elected representative they must judge is not exclusive to any area in particular. Hence these elected representatives should be judged on their capacity to work in partnership with other levels of governance to produce relevant solutions. 

d)	The diversity of categories of goods. The question of knowing whether to make use of the private sector or public management has proved rich ground for political debate over the last hundred years. It stems in particular from the beginnings of this debate in the 19th century spurred by the confrontation between liberal capitalism and socialism. One of the characteristics of this debate was that it pretended to demonstrate the obvious: if one is in favour of equality and preservation of public property then emphasis should be given to public management; however, if one is in favour of decentralised decision-making, trade, competition and innovation, then preference should be given to private management. But, what is obvious is merely an illusion. It is necessary to go further back in time to see that there is not just one category of property but at least four (cf. my note on the seven changes) and that the problem is not to know whether preference should be given to the public or private sectors, but to know what type of management is adapted to which category of property. 

e)	Relations regarding ethics. The last fifty years have seen debate, at least in the West, almost exclusively focused on rights, to such an extent that the term progressive implies demanding new rights and extending the scope of application of existing ones. Even stepping back a short distance in time makes it necessary to review ethics on the basis of ethical dilemmas, i.e. conflicts between values in which we believe, and attempt to solve the eternal question of the balance between rights and duties. 

In conclusion, it is vital to call into question the foundations and the genealogy of rules and concepts if we are to go beyond the boundaries of pseudo truths. This principle does not only apply to concepts and theories but also to the private and public rules that regulate life in society. For example, in the book "l'Etat au Cœur" (The State at the Heart), André Talmant provides numerous anecdotes illustrating that forgetting the historic reasons for introducing a rule (whether for canal navigation or beer production) cause these rules to become absolute truths, whereas if we examined the reasons behind them, we would discover that these reasons no longer exist and thus the rule is no longer pertinent or legitimate. 

3.	The theory of shifts

A third approach to innovation is based on the observation that not every part of a bio-socio-technical system progresses at the same rhythm, thus there are shifts, malfunctions and disparities of rhythm between the progression of the different parts. The principle of innovation is therefore to identify these major shifts and remedy them. Here, examples abound. However, I shall limit myself to two: the Westphalian state and the social contract.

a)	The Westphalian state. Taking a leaf from the formula of Kimon Valaskakis, we in the World Governance workshop have shown that present thinking on the management of the world community continues to privilege the role of States according to systems founded in the West during the 16th and 17th centuries and which had been more or less codified in the Treaty of Westphalia which put an end to the Thirty Years War. The idea that the monopoly over the public interest belongs to the public authorities and that the sovereignty of the State is an absolute rule that prevails over all other rules stems directly from the installation of absolute monarchies in Europe. However, it is hard to believe that these rules correspond to the current state of globalisation. 

b)	The social contract. Regarding science and the university, we have shown that the social contract that regulated relations between science and society and the university and society (an especially formidable contract since its terms and foundations had been forgotten to be replaced by evidences) dates for the most part from the end of the Second World War, when it corresponded to the economic, scientific and political developments of the time. Hence much of our attempts to innovate concern the analysis of the reasons why these social contracts are obsolete and the procedures of formulating a new social contract. 

4.	Verticality and horizontality

Technical, economic and social developments can often be seen to privilege one dimension as opposed to another. Three obvious examples of how our societies have evolved towards a vertical structure are production industries, science and technology and the organisation of public services. As mentioned above, our societies have progressed from partially autonomous local systems to become increasingly vast economic and political agglomerations. Likewise, we have evolved from science, which was inseparable from philosophy up to the end of the 17th century, to the juxtaposition of a number of sciences and technologies developed within relatively separate disciplines. In the case of production industries, the era of major integrated industrial combines is no longer fashionable; production is organised differently with the formation of global oligopolies and monopolies that govern production industries. They are present in multimedia, water management, mass catering and culture. The same specialisation exists in public systems. When we become aware of the juxtaposition of specialised national systems intended to combat social exclusion on the one hand, and the quasi monopolistic development of Vivendi and AOL in multimedia on the other, we can see they represent two sides of the same coin. The need to right this imbalance by implementing horizontal systems to build more even, matrix structured societies in which local cohesion is as important as vertical production processes thus becomes obvious. The same approach can be used to privilege partnership between territories in the combat against social exclusion, to regroup scientific and technical knowledge in the framework of education strategies, and define the territory as a new social and economic actor. 

5.	Matching perceptions of reality drawn from very different areas

This is a traditional approach in scientific innovation and quite similar to the approach of transposition. I shall give only one example. I had to sum up the discussions of one of the first groups dealing with the institutional logic of the media and was struck by the obvious parallel between the management of financial markets (which consist in managing the mediation between all the different pieces of financial information) and the logic of the media (which consist in managing the mediation between pieces of information and its packaging). What also struck me was how shocked journalists were at being compared to financiers. The fact of working in separate worlds prohibits awareness of parallels that are obvious for any external observer. Thus the lie is given to the illusion that managing information is in the public interest, whereas managing money is crassly materialistic. I felt this shock to be salutary, all that it requires is to change one's spectacles. 

6.	The search for mechanics who combine the relation between macro and micro 

Our choice of the subtitle "The Mechanic of Governance" for the work "The State at the Heart" is not fortuitous. The characteristic of the currently fashionable one-track thinking, which is also shared by communism and, to a lesser extent, by psychoanalysis, is its propensity to present itself as an all-embracing theory that accounts satisfactorily for mechanisms in operation at very local level and even personal and interpersonal levels, as well as social and economic mechanisms that cover the whole of society. This was the reason for the huge superiority of Newton's theory of gravitation in the 17th century, which demonstrated that the same laws applied to both falling apples and planetary gravitation. We have need for such an integral approach in view to structural innovation. If we focus on local innovations in the field of social economy, we should also question how these innovations could be transposed to macro-economic policies. If we work on active subsidiarity on the scale of conurbations, we should check whether the same approach could be used for world governance. This why we should give particular attention to fractal type approaches, i.e. approaches in which the same structural data exist whatever the level of detail. I have often spoken of the "fractality" of the Alliance, by comparing it to Rubik's cube, a large cube composed of smaller cubes with coloured sides that can be oriented in every direction. This is one of the Alliance's potential and considerable strengths, that of combining three types of diversity (geographic, collegial and topical) that reflect the same composition on whatever level of detail one finds oneself. 

7.	Inversion

Inversion is a mathematical operation known by every high school pupil that consists in transferring everything on the outside towards the centre and vice-versa, a process well-described by the Apostles: "The stone that had been discarded by the builders has become the cornerstone". In the social field, this principle of inversion is one that I have found decisive. I shall use three examples to demonstrate it: 

a)	The principle of active subsidiarity. I have already mentioned this principle for its virtues of integration. The following is another of them: since the beginning of time governance has always been exercised from the centre, for it is here that society is managed on a territorial scale while that which was sent to the marches represented the link between the two scales of the territory. Being sent to the marches means being sent to the non-thought or slightly thought. Today, the principle of reversing the structure of governance amounts to saying that it is the links between different territorial scales which are decisive while the problem of managing a given territory is almost secondary. 

b)	Local agreements. In local agreements to combat social exclusion we place persons at the centre and specialised structures for dealing with this exclusion at the boundary. I often use the expression "the inversion of unity and diversity" or "the inversion of the concrete and the abstract" when speaking of governance, i.e. public systems deal with situations as units (e.g., a category of handicapped) that people consider as an equal number of different fates and deal with the different dimensions of the handicap or exclusion. On the contrary, what counts for individuals is their own integrity and wholeness. Inversion applied to governance is simply changing from a system that walks on its head to one that places both feet on the ground. 

c)	Democracy and information. Access to information has always been expensive which is why control of information is one of the central cogs of power and one of the main victories of democracy. When we launched DPH in 1986, we instinctively felt that the problem of access to information was becoming a secondary problem due to the development of new information and communication technologies; on the other hand, what had been the secondary problem of selecting and structuring this information was becoming primordial.