While France was hosting the 2016 European football championship, the country should have been crowing to the cries of ‘Allez les bleus'. But what slightly depressed the national mood at what should have been a time of celebration, was the important widespread threat of industrial action in the form of strikes, blockades and violent demonstrations. The General Confederation of labour (CGT), the French oldest and most influential trade union, has been responsible for the strikes that affected transport across the country, undertaking these actions to raise their say about employment law reforms.

Map that displays the petrol stations running out of fuel

(Source: The Local)

La Provence, a famous French news magazine that releases more than 120,000 copies daily and distributed to 600,000 readers, offers all kind of news about the French region Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur. At the moment of the strikes and fuel shortages, the company provided the names of the petrol stations in the region that had fuel again, with an update in real time. Other well-known websites such as Corse-Matin, took the same initiative to crowdsource the name of the services stations that were opened and the name of those that were closed due to the strikes.

The use of crowdsourcing in this situation was an innovative way to use Awesome Table in combination with Google Forms. Indeed, people were able to enter the information (which gas stations were closed / opened) by filling in an online questionnaire. After validation of the responses by the website administrators, these data were directly retrieved in a spreadsheet and displayed on an Awesome Table view.

By using Awesome Table, people knew exactly what was happening, and were informed about the availabilities of petrol in the region. La Provence as well as Corse-matin were able to keep track of the situation thanks to this web application. Indeed, people just needed to select a town in their region, a department, and the type of fuel wanted to display a detailed list of the petrol stations running out of fuel (or not).

Awesome Table answered to a short-term need, and was the perfect tool to present data, with an update in real time. With its outstanding capacities to gather and share information, this application is also very often used to answer to long-term needs with higher degrees of complexity.