Hi everybody, I'm here to tell you a story about how French public agency managed to
migrate their users from Excel to Greece.
By the way, my name is Fréran, I work as a developer for the French public agency ANCT
in the Doné Territoire team, Doné Territoire meaning Data and Territory.
But I'm not here to talk about myself, I'm here to talk to you about Anne, who is a French
public agent working for the ANCT as she is in charge of subsidy programs and she has
to have the feedback about how it goes.
So she sends Excel spreadsheets to Priscilla, Paul and Patrick who are regional workers
because she hasn't had the data herself.
And then they don't have the data themselves neither, they send to regional local agents
and well, it didn't work, went as expected.
Paul didn't understand correctly what Anne asked for, so he sends her new data.
Then Patrick is in CECLIVE, so it didn't have the time to send the data to the local
users in time.
And Priscilla is a bit worried about the data, she received back from the local agents and
she asks for clarifications, sends partial data to Anne, but still she has a bit delayed.
So finally what happened?
Anne Gathers and the data, she realizes that the data are incomplete and outdated and well,
she has colleagues who adjust her to send the data and well, she went back to the regional
and local agents for clarifications and they're just fed up with these spreadsheets.
So here comes GRIST.
GRIST is a collaborative spreadsheet, but not only it's also a local platform, if you
know it's kind of an alternative and open source.
It's made by GRIST Labs with a small US-based company and yeah, we deployed an instance
that we self-host ourselves for data sovereignty.
Why we chose GRIST?
Because we didn't develop it ourselves at first.
First because it's hacker-friendly.
You have formulas in Python, you have many possibilities with that, just with that.
Second you have access control list, which means that when a local agent fears the data
that is for his local administration, he doesn't see the data of the other local agents.
Obviously, it's free-level open source.
That's why we're here, but it was a criterion we had at first.
And it's easy to consume data, so we can transform and publish part of it as an open data.
Here is how GRIST looks like.
You have a spreadsheet and well, I don't have much time to make your demo, so let's get
in touch.
And just to finish, we don't fork this project.
We contribute with development and many stuff like that.
Thank you.