Geeks, Webmasters and State Technologists: Evangelizing the Internet

At a time when digital skills were scarcely distributed, especially within public organizations, the promotion of Internet development created uncommon connections between activists, entrepreneurs and high-ranking civil servants. Passionate about technology and convinced of its transforming power, they endeavored to adopt the Internet and to spread its core principles of openness and collaboration in policymaking. This chapter presents the modalities of the technological “evangelization” of public authorities in France. It shows how institutional entrepreneurs have built a network of organizations that favored the circulation of knowledge and practices from hacker circles to large public administrations.