Genealogy & Structure of the On-line ePLANETe Platform

This report is an adaptation of CHAPTER 3 of the PhD thesis completed by Ashiquer RAHMAN, under the supervision of Dr. Jean-Marc Douguet (soutenance publique on the 17 September 2019, Université Paris Saclay, France), intitled Innovation, Education, Sustainability: Discovery and Deliberation with the experimental ‘ePLANETe’ platform for Knowlede Mediation.
The purpose of CHAPTER 3 within the thesis, was to present, in a historical as well as institutional perspective, the on-line ‘ePLANETe' concept and functionalities as a technical and pedagogic innovation programme contributing to sustainability goals in higher education.  That is, to position the “knowledge gateway” within the thesis’ triangle of eco-innovation / higher education / sustainability.
Developed by the KerBabel team at the UVSQ during the years 2000-2015, the suite of Internet-based knowledge mediation and deliberation support functionalities now united in ‘ePLANETe’ can indeed be seen as an experimentation of the challenges of “ICT for Green”.  The new digital technologies are exploited (i) to facilitate collaborative research and student learning about sustainability challenges, and (ii) as deliberation support tools in the pursuit of sustainability performance in territorial governance, public policy and business strategy, as well as in the higher education sector itself.
For the needs of a stand-alone document, we have slightly revised and reorganized the text of the original thesis CHAPTER 3.  Some of these revisions are purely formal, such as re-numbering of the sections, tables, and figures.  We have placed the synthetic presentation of the ‘ePLANETe’ Platform, which was part of the introductory section of Chapter 3, as a Preface right at the front of this report.  We have inserted additional footnotes and blocks of reference information, notably in order to position the exposition in relation to the PhD thesis by Philippe Lanceleur, L’Expérience KerBabel, which was also completed during 2019,  in parallel with that of Ashiquer Rahman.  Finally, we have provided hyperlinks to publications and research documentation (when available), and consolidated some blocks of unpublished documentation as Annexes.