One of the most interesting, promising and engaging projects I’ve been working on the last months have been the new open digital building design knowledge sharing platform Relinquish. I maintain two Revit blogs, administer one Revit forum and use Twitter daily for BIM related social media. However, I have been intrigued by the way the forum, blogs and free content at autodeskvasari.com have developed, and want to investigate any similar positive effects for an entire industry. From our front page:

The Digital Building Design Knowledge Sharing Impulse – Relinquish – is a non-profit initiative for collecting, connecting and communicating knowledge on the digital built environment. We believe the greatest unfulfilled potential in the building design industry lies in the connected brains of all the people who do great research every day without sharing it with others.

relinquish.no/blogs/13

The people behind this initiative are Arne Folkestad Bjelland and myself, representing Dark Architects and Dark AS. In addition we have received valuable help from Kim Baumann Larsen from Placebo Effects and Angie Arroyo Mendez at A-Lab. We are very interested in hearing from other people who want to get involved in organizing, and welcome absolutely everyone to register and contribute with knowledge.

A very specific goal for us is to tie together knowledge and content, and we have therefore decided to upload our Revit 2014 company library and share it with registered users. The template and families are mainly early phase content, and although most of it is English there are some traces of Norwegian (specially in the Data folder). You will definitely find content that we have downloaded elsewhere and not produced ourselves, exemplified with Andy Milburn’s Flat People. Given that it has already been shared freely on the Internet I take it that the producers have no problems with this. In case you have, please do not hesitate to contact me, and I’ll remove it.

We decided to use Google Drive because of synchronization benefits, while still perhaps maintaining some level of editing permission control.

Given that all the current contributors and most of the registered users are Norwegian, I expect that there will be a mixture of English and Norwegian in the future. We have decided to use as little guidance as possible to start with, hoping that will help contribution flourish.

Please let me know if you are interested in sharing your content, and please give us your thoughts if you check out ours. Happy sharing!