GEAB 176

Christophe Cesetti, who has a background in management control, currently operates as a freelancer within a cooperative, focusing on projects associated with the social economy. Disappointed by the inability of multinational structures to bring about change, he turned to citizen politics and developed a practical approach to collective intelligence in the service of the Commons. He shares with us the fruits of his experience on the future challenges of combining the human collective and digital tools. 

In the early years of my career, I was confronted with the rigour and harshness of conventional organisations as a Sector Management Controller at Adecco, a global group whose ability to put pressure on individuals I saw for myself. Then, in 2007, I moved to sustainable development at ISS (Facility Management for Energy, Reception, Logistics and Hygiene). It was a very relevant issue for this group, which was also global. It was an avant-garde position, but it was cut short by the subprime crisis in 2008. The management changed and the strategy changed, so it only lasted a year. That episode made me very pessimistic about the ability of conventional structures to change things. That’s when I first got involved in ‘civic politics’. I started by exploring the Newropeans proposal with Franck Biancheri and the Paris team in 2009. I worked with Etienne Chouard and his workshops on constituent assemblies, where I acted as a facilitator, which led me to collective intelligence. I experimented with citizens’ lotteries and majority voting, and even ran for Parliament in 2007 under the banner of the #MAVOIX movement. I based my approach on the work of Jean-François Noubel, a collective intelligence researcher, with whom I also collaborated. My motivation was: how can we create a society with a different form of politics, and therefore a different form of humanity? I set up the ‘Valeureux’ association with some other researchers in 2010, and from then on I gradually decided to work as a freelancer for various SSE (Social and Solidarity Economy) organisations, associations and citizens.