How It Begun
Commun Axiom is a platform that I have been working on since 2018. I have been collaborating with the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Montréal (CIRM) since early 2018. At that time, I was involved in the design of a project called the Observatoire des récits de la ville de Montréal. I was providing Pascal Brissette, the ideator of the Observatory, with the technological side and the necessary plans for the design of the platform. During this experience, we met with several CRIEM partners working in the Montreal community. Most of these organizations had data that could potentially be interesting for the design of an observatory and these partners were interested in the idea of such a technological solution. However, I noticed that in most cases, legal, ethical, technological or operational constraints were blocking the data sharing process that would have allowed us to advance the research. This made me notice a technological need within NPO ecosystems which lack the means and time to set up major technological infrastructures but whose ethical and legal responsibilities as well as the trust of users are important issues. It is the compilation of the different needs identified during the meetings that led me to the conception of Commun Axiom.
A Challenge And An Opportunity
Common Axiom is a big platform and requires a lot of work for its development. In fact, I had already made a lot of progress on the architecture as well as on the technological choices until 2019. I had already started to build code bases to support proofs of concept but, due to lack of time and resources, development was slow. It was in late 2019 that Commun Axiom was suggested, in partnership with CRIEM and its Observatory, as a project to be included in the Smart Cities Challenge launched by the Government of Canada. LIUM, interested in the proposal, included it in the application sent to the challenge by the city of Montreal. Montreal won the challenge and allowed us to hire a team of developers who greatly accelerated the development of the platform. This development is still in progress today.