Participative documentary spaces and governance

In this paper, it is proposed to describe some characteristics of participative digital documentary spaces that can be used to document the stakes involved in the governance of a territory in both distributed and decentralised ways. While presenting their characteristics and their uses, we will suggest that they fulfil several functions associated with governance, such as taking the stakeholders into account and setting up new knowledge that can be used to inform the decisions to be taken. We will argue in favour of the idea that the changing methods of governance occurring in participative documentary spaces (PDS) and the continuous activity of documentarisation facilitate sociocognitive hybridisation, which in return contributes to the development of new forms of territorial governance. In the last section, three PDS representative of these new forms of documentarisation will be presented: Wikipedia, the participative indexing systems associated with Web 2.0 (folksonomies), and the system of cartographic annotation (geotagging) available in the Google Maps system.