Common ground with Open Design Alliance (ODA)
https://wiki.osarch.org/index.php?title=Open_Design_Alliance_(ODA)
I'm having a chat tomorrow with Neil Peterson, president of Open Design Alliance, after he read the interview with Ralph Grabowski . We'll be talking about possible common ground and I'd love to hear peoples thoughts on that. They're interested in our project generally and have previously discussed the role of opensource in their work.
So there may be some interesting possibilities to cooperate on specific projects where our interests overlap. Any suggestions? I'm not a fan of permissive licenses but some of the projects we have could be part of their products already if they're MIT licensed. Maybe a start would be finding those projects in their stack and finding an appropriate way to support them.
Another area of common ground could be in online tools for testing conformity with standards. Maybe they'd like to incorporate support for the MicroMVD approach so firms can share recipes. I suppose they could even just promote some of our projects to their members to gain use and recognition. What about simply sharing processes with bS & IfcOpenShell for testing IFC export/import quality?
Let me know what you think, sorry for the short notice but I'll be chatting with him tomorrow afternoon. But once we have a connection we can always talk again some time later.
Comments
This should be something to ping @aothms for IfcOpenShell and potentially the XBim folks too, as both of those projects already overlap with the ODA's offerings. Perhaps the Assimp project has an overlap too.
You will have a first talk. You don't need to take decisions at that moment.
What both of you could do:
-Like Blender, you can just look for first small collaboration projects. That will move things to a stronger collaboration in the future.
- A donation program for OSArch and BlenderBIM (like Blender's donation program). But I think this will be latter, after the first point.
I don't think they will try to greenwash their reputation. OSArch is too small at the moment to be an umbrella for big initiatives like them. I think a good strategy is to listen first what they want. And then you could see what is possible to do with current OSArch organization. Fist, start with small steps of collaboration. Big projects will come latter (unless they just are looking for a new member for their organization, to pay a registration fee. That would not be good).
Exactly right. I think it's great that they're even asking themselves what we could do together.