Pour une approche processuelle de l’engagement participatif : Les mécanismes de construction de la compétence civique au sein d’institutions de démocratie participative

Alors que les phénomènes de désaffection, de perte de confiance ou d’apathie interrogent les démocraties contemporaines, l’implication de citoyens ordinaires au sein d’institutions de démocratie participative semblerait en mesure d’accroître leur compétence civique. Ils y acquièrent une formation à l’action collective, des connaissances techniques et politiques, autant de compétences susceptibles de faire bifurquer significativement leur trajectoire politique. Si ces processus de politisation, fruits de l’engagement participatif, sont en partie issus des dispositions initiales des acteurs et de certaines données générationnelles, ils pourraient néanmoins avoir un impact significatif sur le fonctionnement du gouvernement représentatif, par l’émergence de nouvelles élites politiques et associatives locales.While the growing defiance and apathy of the public question contemporary democracies, ordinary citizens’ involvement in participatory democracy institutions seems to have a positive impact on their civic competence. They gain a training in collective action, increase their technical and political knowledge, i.e., acquire new competences, significantly shaping their political trajectory. Even if these politicization processes – stemming from participatory engagement – are also due to actors’ initial dispositions and to some generational factors, they could nevertheless have a decisive impact on the way representative government works, by fostering the emergence of new political and associative elites at the local level

What's the matter with the banlieues? Exploring the importation of the American community organizing tradition by French social movements

International audienc

An algebraic theory for behavioral modeling and protocol synthesis in system design

International audienceThe design productivity gap has been recognized by the semiconductor industry as one of the major threats to the continued growth of system-on-chips and embedded systems. Ad-hoc system-level design methodologies, that lifts modeling to higher levels of abstraction, and the concept of intellectual property (IP), that promotes reuse of existing components, are essential steps to manage design complexity. However, the issue of compositional correctness arises with these steps. Given components from different manufacturers, designed with heterogeneous models, at different levels of abstraction, assembling them in a correct-by-construction manner is a difficult challenge. We address this challenge by proposing a process algebraic model to support system design with a formal model of computation and serve as a type system to capture the behavior of system components at the interface level. The proposed algebra is conceptually minimal, equipped with a formal semantics defined in a synchronous model of computation. It supports a scalable notion and a flexible degree of abstraction. We demonstrate its benefits by considering the type-based synthesis of latency-insensitive protocols, showing that the synthesis of component wrappers can be optimized by behavioral information carried by interface type descriptions and yield minimized stalls and maximized throughput

« Le jour où toi et moi on sera vraiment égaux, j’irai voter »

Les normes qui structurent les interactions discursives dans l’espace public façonnent également les mobilisations citoyennes. En France, la difficulté de parler publiquement des discriminations raciales contraint les formes de mobilisation qui visent à faire participer les citoyens à la vie de la cité. À partir d’une enquête ethnographique menée dans la ville de Roubaix, et du suivi de plusieurs initiatives visant à lutter contre l’abstention, l’article réinvestit par le bas la question des effets des jeux de cadrage sur les dynamiques d’action collective. Dans ce cas, l’écart observé entre un cadre civique et un cadre racialisé contraint les initiatives de mobilisations électorales, qui résonnent peu avec l’expérience ordinaire des acteurs. Alors que le premier rappelle que le vote est un devoir civique, le second souligne qu’une des conditions de la citoyenneté est l’égalité de traitement entre tous les membres de la communauté politique. Ce faisant, l’article démontre que les échanges communicationnels dans l’espace public ont des conséquences pratiques très concrètes.Norms structuring discursive interactions in the public sphere also shape civic mobilizations. In France, the discomfort in speaking publicly about racial discriminations also constrain political engagement aimed at involving citizens in civic life. Based on an ethnographic study in the city of Roubaix, and the observation of several experiments aimed at fighting abstention, this article tackles from below the question of the effects of framing processes on collective action dynamics. In this case, the gap between a civic frame and a racial frame limits civic engagement drives, that hardly resonate with the ordinary experience of actors. While the first one perceives voting as a civic duty, the other frame emphasizes that a condition of civic life is equal treatment of all the members of the polity. This article therefore shows that communicative interactions in the public sphere have very tangible political outputs

Liquid Clocks - Refinement Types for Time-Dependent Stream Functions

The concept of liquid clocks introduced in this paper is a significant step towards a more precise compile-time framework for the analysis of synchronous and polychromous languages. Compiling languages such as Lustre or SIGNAL indeed involves a number of static analyses of programs before they can be synthesized into executable code, e.g., synchronicity class characterization, clock assignment, static scheduling or causality analysis. These analyses are often equivalent to undecidable problems, necessitating abstracting such programs to provide sound yet incomplete analyses. Such abstractions unfortunately often lead to the rejection of programs that could very well be synthesized into deterministic code, provided abstraction refinement steps could be applied for more accurate analysis. To reduce the false negatives occurring during the compilation process, we leverage recent advances in type theory -- with the definition of decidable classes of value-dependent type systems -- and formal verification, linked to the development of efficient SAT/SMT solvers, to provide a type-theoretic approach that considers all the above analyses as type inference problems. In order to simplify the exposition of our new approach in this paper, we define a refinement type system for a minimalistic, synchronous, stream-processing language to concisely represent, analyse, and verify logical and quantitative properties of programs expressed as stream-processing data-flow networks. Our type system provides a new framework to represent logical time (clocks) and scheduling properties, and to describe their relations with stream values and, possibly, other quantas. We show how to analyze synchronous stream processing programs (à la Lustre, Signal) to enable previously described analyzes involved in compiling such programs. We also prove the soundness of our type system and elaborate on the adaptability of this core framework by outlining its extensibility to specific models of computations and other quantas

Polychronous mode automata

International audienceAmong related synchronous programming principles, the model of computation of the Polychrony workbench stands out by its capability to give high-level description of systems where each component owns a local activation clock (such as, typically,distributed real-time systems or systems on a chip). In order to bring the modeling capability of Polychrony to the context of a model-driven engineering toolset for embedded system design, we define a diagramic notation composed of mode automata and data-flow equations on top of the multi-clocked synchronous model of computation supported by the Polychrony workbench. We demonstrate the agility of this paradigm by considering the example of an integrated modular avionics application. Our presentation features the formalization and use of model transformation techniques of the GME environment to embed the extension of Polychrony's meta-model with mode automata

Model-Driven Interoperability of Dependencies Visualizations

International audienceSoftware tools and corresponding knowledge tend to be collected and packaged into platforms like Eclipse, MathLab or KDE. Their success and usefulness combined with their growing size and complexity rise issues about management of dependencies between their components and between the platform and other applications which rely on its plug-in system and/or provided functionalities. Such problems imply need for dependencies management tools in which visualization is a core feature. As dependencies are also a concern in domains like Object-Oriented Programming or Operating System packaging, we may expect to reuse corresponding works in visualization. But each domain and its related dependencies problem have induced their own hard coded viewing and browsing tools. In this article we present how we have reuse existing visualization tools for our platform cartography together with our own displays using a Model-Driven Interoperability approach to easily realize bindings between visualization tools

Modular interpretation of heterogeneous modeling diagrams into synchronous equations using static single assignment

The ANR project SPACIFY develops a domain-specific programming environment, Synoptic, to engineer embedded software for space applications. Synoptic is an Eclipse-based modeling environment which supports all aspects of aerospace software design. As such, it is a domain-specific environment consisting of heterogeneous modeling and programming principles defined in collaboration with the industrial partners and end users of the project : imperative synchronous programs, data-flow diagrams, mode automata, blocks, components, scheduling, mapping and timing. This article focuses on the essence and distinctive features of its behavioral or programming aspects : actions, flows and automata, for which we use the code generation infrastructure of the synchronous modeling environment SME. It introduces an efficient method for transforming a hierarchy of blocks consisting of actions (sequential Esterel-like programs), data-flow diagrams (to connect and time modules) and mode automata (to schedule or mode blocks) into a set of synchronous equations. This transformation minimizes the needed state variables and block synchronizations. It consists of an inductive static-single assignment transformation algorithm across a hierarchy of blocks that produces synchronous equations. The impact of this new transformation technique is twofold. With regards to code generation objectives, it minimizes the needed resynchronization of each block in the system with respects to its parents, potentially gaining substantial performance from way less synchronizations. With regards to verification requirements, it minimizes the number of state variables across a hierarchy of automata and hence maximizes model checking performances

Compositional design of isochronous systems

International audienceThe synchronous modeling paradigm provides strong correctness guarantees for embedded system design while requiring minimal environmental assumptions. In most related frameworks, global execution correctness is achieved by ensuring the insensitivity of (logical) time in the program from (real) time in the environment. This property, called endochrony or patience, can be statically checked, making it fast to ensure design correctness. Unfortunately, it is not preserved by composition, which makes it difficult to exploit with component-based design concepts in mind. Compositionality can be achieved by weakening this objective, but at the cost of an exhaustive state-space exploration. This raises a trade-off between performance and precision. Our aim is to balance it by proposing a formal design methodology that adheres to a weakened global design objective: the non-blocking composition of weakly endochronous processes, while preserving local design objectives for synchronous modules. This yields an effective and cost-efficient approach to compositional synchronous modeling

Introduction

National audienc