photo by Paul Wilkinson
Last Wednesday I found myself underground at the Building Centre in London with a select group of people for the BE2Awards / Talks. (Built Environment Web 2.0 and Social Media) chaired by Bernie Mitchell
http://www.be2awards.com/2012-be2talks/
I’d been invited to speak about “BIM, Bikes, Blogs and Pozzoni”, particularly how BIM and social media go together like “ipads & skinny latte” and how I had used social media to promote Pozzoni’s BIM credentials since the 2011 Government Construction strategy mandated the use of BIM. I was sharing the platform with some other speakers and the awards were given out between the talks.
I was on after the interval so nervously fumbled my notes with thumbs dancing on my phone tweeting away as I watched the other speakers before me.
There was a definite biking and outdoors twist to the talks and I found them engaging and entertaining. There were about 40 in the room and many more watching online as it was held as part of London Social Media week.
Richard Saxon, the UK’s BIMbassador was up first talking about Growth through BIM, selling UK PLC BIM skills to the rest of the world and gave us the news we are now 2nd behind Finland in our BIM maturity. (he also told me during coffee that the Pozzoni / Kier scheme Poynton High School was shown in Brussels the day before!)
Cycling Journalist Carlton Reid then spoke about the UK bike scene which was well received before a great presentation by Phil Sorrel on GeoBlogging, a few of us in the room immediately seeing possible practical applications for this technology on Construction sites.
Nick Katz talked about Honest Buildings, a crowd sourced platform for connecting business opportunities and building data and Tim Oldman spoke on the Leesman index, a measurement of workplace productivity to feed into evidence based design.
The closing address was by Liz Male, chair of Trustmark who spoke about the Green Deal and the implications of a recent omission to the legislation regarding ancillary works.
My piece seemed to go down well, I used my normal style of big images, trying to lighten the tone of what can normally be a fairly dry subject as I bounced around BIM, Bikes and Blogs, ending with a call for more use of project collaboration extranets and use of open IDs and encourage this.
Of course every awards ceremony has a party and we all trooped across the road to the College Arms for a Beer or 3 of course all checking in with Four Square as we crossed the street!