Our presentation at Wagtail Space 2026

The Team behind Sites Conformes

Emma Ghariani

Head of the Open Source and Digital Commons Unit – DINUM

Juliette Dixmier

Product manager and user success – Sites Conformes

Sylvain Boissel

Developer – Sites Conformes

Lucie Laporte

Developer – Sites Conformes

What if the State builds its own tools ?

Tchap

replaces Whatsapp

Visio

replaces Zoom and Teams

Docs

replaces Google Docs, Word and Notion

Grist

replaces Google Sheet, Excel

What do these projects have in common ?

They are not outsourced to a vendor, and they are not built by a single ministry for its own use. They are shared investments — digital commons.

At the European level, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Luxembourg have created the (Ouvre une nouvelle fenêtre) EDIC Digital Commons consortium.
Germany is building (Ouvre une nouvelle fenêtre) OpenDesk, their equivalent of La Suite.

Both are open-source, interoperable, and already used by over half a million public agents. The European Commission is about to publish its own open-source strategy, positioning free software as a lever for European digital sovereignty.

And ✨ Sites Conformes ✨ is our contribution to this effort.

Why does Wagtail fit ?

3 things that make all the difference :

• Python and Django ecosystem

French administration already uses Django for many of its digital services. Choosing Wagtail meant we could build on top of an existing ecosystem and facilitate interoperability. And by integrating the (Ouvre une nouvelle fenêtre) DSFR into Django — not just into Wagtail — our work benefits the broader Django community in the French administration, not only Sites Conformes users.

• StreamFields

This is the feature that made everything possible. Each component in the French design system can be a block in a StreamField. But it also gives us great flexibility: when new components are added to the design system, we can implement them as new blocks without redesigning the whole platform. There is currently a V2 of the DSFR in the works, and we believe this block-based approach will make the migration much easier.

• Community

This is the most important point. When you spend public money on a tool, you need to know it will still exist in 10 years. Wagtail is backed by an active, independent open-source community with contributors all over the world. That means the French state benefits from upstream improvements without paying for all of them.

And we try to give back:

1. We funded a security code audit of Wagtail and shared the results with the core team. We run accessibility audits that sometimes help us spot issues in the back-office too.
2. We work with designers and accessibility experts on recommendations for the admin interface.
3. And we have started talking about doing user research — and sharing the results with the community.

We are still learning how to be good contributors — but that is the goal.

Club Contributeurs : the Fellowship of Sites Conformes

How do we build it ?

Wagtail is worth investing in because you won't be alone. And Sites Conformes is worth joining because you won't be alone either.

That is the main promise we offer today: not just a tool to use, but a tool to improve together — and a way to share the costs and the investment.

We found inspiration in the Decidim user club — Decidim is an open-source participatory democracy platform from Barcelona, where users co-govern the product. And within the DINUM itself, La Suite Numérique already has its own Club — the Club administrations La Suite. We thought: we can do something similar for Sites Conformes.

We started by identifying the government bodies that were already using Sites Conformes or had a strong interest in it. We invited them — not just to pay, but to bring what they could. Because the key thing about the Club Contributeurs is that contributions are not only financial.

Who's in it ?

DINUM Ouvre une nouvelle fenêtre

– Direction Interministérielle du Numérique

maintains the core product, runs the team, and coordinates the roadmap.

ANSSI Ouvre une nouvelle fenêtre

– Agence Nationale de la Sécurité des Systèmes d'Information

helps us building secure websites and working toward security certification.

ADEME Ouvre une nouvelle fenêtre

– Agence de la Transition Ecologique

helps us thinking about the environmental impact of sites we produce.

SGAMI - Est

Ministry of Interior – Agence de la Transition Ecologique

contributes as a deployer and hoster. They can deploy and host Sites Conformes websites for the entire Ministry of Interior.

Agreste

– Ministry of Agriculture

helps us improving the product and contributes to the development of new features.

Académie de Nancy-Metz

– Ministry of Education

contributes on deployment and has built their own "sites factory" to spin up multiple Sites Conformes instances with one click.

How does it work ?

The Club is both a governance space and a knowledge-sharing space. It is about learning from each other.

In practice, we started with a kick-off workshop : everyone in the same room. The goal was to collect priorities and define how we would work together. And very quickly, something happened: administrations realised they were facing the same problems (multilingual management, accessibility, deployment) without knowing it. What had been treated as isolated needs became shared priorities.

From there, we established a charter. A few key principles: all developments are published as open source under the AGPL v3 licence. We focus on the 80% of needs that are common to everyone. The governance is designed to evolve as the Club grows.

Every 6 months, a product committee brings members together to prioritise the roadmap and decisions are made by consensus when possible.

We also try to build a community of users : a space where people who manage government websites can report bugs, share difficulties, and ask questions.

How do we convince ?

Challenges

For further reading

• (Ouvre une nouvelle fenêtre) Can France Really Do Without Microsoft and Google? | Emma Ghariani (in French)
• (Ouvre une nouvelle fenêtre) Transforming the State Through Digital Commons: A Sociological Study of a Reform Movement at the Intersection of Law, Technology, and Politics (1990–2020) (in French)
• (Ouvre une nouvelle fenêtre) State Digital Ecosystem Observatory (in French)
• (Ouvre une nouvelle fenêtre) LaSuite Docs : Open Source collaborative documentation platform
• (Ouvre une nouvelle fenêtre) Scaling national open-source products across Europe: lessons learned from two years of cross-border state collaboration
• (Ouvre une nouvelle fenêtre) Power to the Public Stack: Governing Europe’s Digital Commons
• (Ouvre une nouvelle fenêtre) LaSuite presentation
• (Ouvre une nouvelle fenêtre) Panel: Public Procurement for Digital Sovereignty
• (Ouvre une nouvelle fenêtre) French Government's Digital Strategy (in French)
• (Ouvre une nouvelle fenêtre) Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Structural Dependencies and Systemic Vulnerabilities in the Digital Sector and the Risks to France’s Independence (in French)
• (Ouvre une nouvelle fenêtre) Digital sovereignty: The government is accelerating efforts to reduce its dependence on non-European sources (in French)