BIMvoice Circle - openBIM Community
Good people of OSArch, I would like to vent with you an idea: I was thinking to launch a community for people who are interested to speed up their journey with openBIM tools: BlenderBIM, IDS and IfcOpenshell itself and/or for people who want to support these FOSS. What people will get will be more user friendly tutorials for their needs, + other perks. Focus would user friendliness and accessability to reach as many professionals in AEC as possible. One of the most important perk would be a (at least monthly) live stream, where everyone can join to tackle the most burning issues, and to decide the course of the community. Now here comes the interesting part and where you could play an important role. I would also like to feature the heavy weigth openBIM people in these meetings, and not just interview then, but actually debating, or even working live on something, or providing solutions to some challenges. You might think that why the fuck would people want to waste their time, and you are right. My answer to that would be this: this is going to be a paid community (reasonable price
and affordable to everyone) and 50% of the sales will be re-directed to the further development of IfcOpenShell and BlenderBIM. It's just a first idea and I was thinking that $12 ($99 if you pay for 12 months) would be something everyone in the West should afford to pay and it should be a steal for all the goodies they will get. Then apply a further (30-50%) discount for people who cannot afford this ammount. For this to make it work I would need implication from the heavy weight people from the community at least 2 or 3 times over one year. No, I do not plan and expect to get rich with this, my plan is simple: to fund current costs to run BIMvoice, to fund the resources needed to keep this an active and thriving community, and to produce MUCH more content to make a bigger impact, and for BIMvoice to become the largest financial contributor to IFCopenShell and other open source projects. I would love to hear what you guys think about something like this.
Comments
IFC.js courses really enabled the growth in development by making it possible to fund the development. This seems like something similar and would definitely support it as much as I can
What would you propose to do? Make it so that anybody with a minimum of 10$ per month (closest tier to the $12 you propose, and transparent platform to keep track that includes existing donors) on https://opencollective.com/opensourcebim has access to a monthly meetup? In that meetup someone would propose a topic and we'd do a live demo working on that topic? Or improve usability related to that topic?
You actually gave me an idea. Why not resurrect the OSArch meetings, but do it more pragmatically? Not just presenting things but doing demos that people can use in their work. A good example is Bruno Postle's demo on how to use IFC git.
Why are they not happening anymore anyway? We can ask what the community wants and we can touch on those topics. I can try to help with this, by coordinating the meetings if there is no one else who can do it.