Steering Committee documents are hosted in the OSArch gitlab repository

Meeting notes for Wednesday June 8th, 1930 UTC

Quick topics

• Our wiki is so ugly it hurts Duncans eyes.

  • There are some nice templates out there. Here is a list of Stable skins. And here are some nice examples. Bruno can you have a chat with Anton Tetov to investigate what it would take to implement a better skin for our wiki?

• File format for better software directory.

  • Duncan described a project he heard about with a .yaml file describing software. Such a structure seems like a better way to run a software directory than what we have now. publiccode.yml The [FSF Directory uses a semantic] wiki(https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Free_Software_Directory). Would be good to have a more standard system so we can consolidate efforts.

• Online presence: Duncan suggests we switch everywhere we can to a background based on Ryans image as used on the OSArch Collective front page.

  • We all agree, so that will slowly be implemented. Ioannis / Ryan will write about 300 words about the project first.

• Update on organisation (Duncan)

  • We were approved as an Open Collective. https://opencollective.com/osarch more discussion later.

Added after the meeting:
Dion wrote this update on OSArch News articles:

• Drafts written so far
  • Upcoming articles: OpenProject CDE article, Blender-OSM has an upcoming milestone
    Potential articles: any FreeCAD updates? anything new happening with LibreCAD? Godot? Topologic update?
    Subscriber: 2020: 20, 2021: 96, 2022 (so far): 126

Main Topics

• What "brand name" should we use? (Ioannis)
  • We discussed about "OSArch" being our 'brand' rather than the phrase "Open Source in Architecture". Especially the reference to 'architecture' can be seen as exclusionarry. We agreed to try and use
    "OSArch - Open Source in AEC" instead. It's more inclusive and people who don't know what AEC is might be outside our target group anyway. Duncan will slowly push this change out.

OSArch Open Collective

We discussed some basic ideas for raising funds in two main categories

• membership
• projects

Membership
Suggestion we have for the forum:

• Basic member $1 / month
• Supporting member $10 /month
• Basic Corporate member $30 / month
• Supporting Corporate member $100 / month

Projects
We tried again to focus on the types of projects we think fit what we're trying to do.

• Incentivize consolidation. For example bringing smaller projects into single projects. There is a lot of overlap between Blender Add-ons for AEC. If we could pay devs to refactor their projects into a smaller number of better add-ons that would be more sustainable.
• Time for the first Blender Application (Template)?
• Topologic into BBIM?
• Sponser a known developer to scratch an AEC itch. For example have RealThunder & Yorik propose a project fitting some funds we have ready.
• OpeningDesign could sketch out a proposal for paying someone to document their workflow.
• Generally support current makers of teaching material, Yassine, Condur/BIMVoice / Dion ...
• More resources put into 'Learn OpenBIM Workflows' - part of learn.osarch.org starting to document the workflows we already have here https://wiki.osarch.org/index.php?title=AECO_Workflow_Examples some discussion on Twitter Yorik is on board with this being hosted by OSArch (Duncan)
• Proposal for a small 1-week hackathon between 5 FOSS projects who are already well engaged in OSArch (e.g. BlenderBIM Add-on, FreeCAD, IFC.JS, Topologic, Homemaker, ...?)

We talked about how if we really want to support a specific person generally rather than a project we're part of designing - then maybe encourage people to fund them directly is better. They'd get 10% more money out of it and we save on administration.

Ryan will look into the functions of Open Collective to see if it is suited to funding such projects

Duncan says please help keep the thread on brainstorming projects we'd like to fund alive so people get more involved.

Possible future agenda items

• discussion on our "market" and how we collaborate with it. (Ioannis/Peter)

Next meeting is hosted by Ioannis. We'll be trying something early morning Chicago time, evening Sydney time, middle of the day in europe during work.