We're excited to welcome Sam Paccoud to We Make Commons, part of the team behind La Suite numérique — France's push to build a sovereign, open source alternative to the proprietary office and collaboration suites most administrations and companies depend on by default.
An open source alternative, not just a policy statement
La Suite bundles tools like Docs (the very platform this blog is published through), messaging, video conferencing, and file storage into a coherent, self-hostable suite explicitly designed to reduce dependency on a small number of dominant foreign cloud providers. It's a rare example of "digital sovereignty" being pursued through actual shipped, open source software rather than through position papers alone.
Building infrastructure people actually choose to use
The hard part of any sovereign tech initiative isn't writing the code — it's making the alternative good enough that people adopt it voluntarily instead of drifting back to the incumbent tools out of habit. That product-and-adoption work, making commons-based tools genuinely competitive on user experience, is where contributors like Sam make the difference between a symbolic project and one that actually shifts the market.
Why this matters for We Make Commons
La Suite is a live demonstration of the thesis behind We Make Commons: public digital infrastructure can be open, sovereign, and genuinely good to use, all at once.
Welcome to We Make Commons, Sam. Glad to have you.