Crisis & CRS 

Edouard Forzy (TBS 1994)
President and Founder of La Mêlée Numérique

The one who started it all...

It was during a previous issue of La Tribu devoted to third places and coworking spaces in May 2017 that I interviewed Edouard for the first time and discovered the World of the Mêlée Numérique, the Cantine de la rue d'Aubuisson, and the Quai des Savoirs.

Edouard told me at the time that his job consisted of "organising chance" and, indeed, the ideation of the Corpoworking Project came partly from exchanges with the Mêlée ecosystem, meetings during the annual festival of digital uses organised by the Mêlée at the Quai des Savoirs under the aegis of the Region and Toulouse Métropole, and contacts with Mêlée partners such as Pascal Rassat, whose "Citistats" impact measurement software now enables us to select the best locations for the project.

A pioneer of the digital economy in Toulouse, Edouard founded the association "La Mêlée Numérique" in 2000 with his classmate Stéphane Contrepois. Very quickly the association gathered 400 members led by a dozen permanent staff. Then came the opening of the first Digital Canteen in France, a concept imported from the United States, in 2010. Shortly afterwards, in the framework of a partnership with Toulouse Métropole and Digital Place, the Canteen moved to rue d'Aubuisson. A few years later a new site was opened at the Quai des Savoirs.

Beyond the contacts and the appropriation of the digital universe of Toulouse, it is indeed the learning of the "agile mode" which was instilled in us by this collaboration and fertilised the exchanges between the different stakeholders of the project.

From an operational point of view, amid a health crisis, La Mêlée handled the remote logistics of the workshops that brought together a hundred or so participants to create the specifications for Action Logement's Corpoworking Project. 

The next step is the joint organisation of a series of conferences, round tables and excursions that will provide the project's stakeholders with food for thought until the first site opens in 2022.