November 2019 🚀 Bricks everywhere! 😵

November has been very active for the Bricks team. Here is a summary of what has been going on:

Batimat, the first time as an exhibitor!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZArv2xGQ7U

We had exhibited in Batimat for 5 days, first time as an exhibitor! I used to visit this fair every two years as an experienced architect. But this year, it is the first time for us as a startup. Looking at things from a different perspective is very motivating!

We were not disappointed. Even if we were scared of not being at the right place, positioned between a smart lock startup and a NFC sensors startup, both set in stone.

But eventually, we had some interesting visits, caught the attention of Julien Denormandie, Ministry of Cities and met a lot of builders, engineers, architects and project owners. Not mentioning the unexpected visits of groups of 10 people that we gave a 5 minutes speech about the Bricks Project and the agile BIM. Something we need to get used to!

This was also the perfect occasion to finalize our french brochure, our kakemono (thank you Margaux for the design :) and also finalize the features page in French and in English!

New users, stay a bit longer...

On the user's front. We have new accounts created every day, which is good news. Unfortunately, a lot of the users are not doing so much, why that?

It is hard to say, maybe they just wanted to give it a look. The only way to check is actually to create an account. We will have public projects soon, that will allow users to try the application easier.

Maybe they don't get what they have to do and what they can do. We are working on it, to allow new users to understand better how to use Bricks and the Agile method. Especially thanks to the application tutorials to train our users and make them want to adopt a different work method. That is actually the key to change in building industry, make people want to change method!

Maybe they were disappointed because they were expecting features that we didn't provide or maybe they didn't find them. How can we know what they wanted? Little interviews would have probably been useful.

To clarify things and to give priority to our actions, we are working with the machinery, a nice and competent company with whom we are working with and preparing surprises that we will talk to you about very soon :)

Bricks news, keep up the rhythm

It is hard to keep up with the news features and upgrades alongside all those efforts to promote Bricks and meet our users. You often have to be in two places at once. But thanks to our team, we still honored out monthly rhythm :)

No more complacency, we want concrete, what's up in November for Bricks?

Associate a contributor to an organization in a project

Now, you can say which company (or organization) is owned by a contributor when you invite him to a project. Even if it is not a major upgrade, this will lead us in the development of more features in the future. Indeed, if you know the organization linked to each user, we can display the user list per company, which is similar to what we can found in building trades. Or how to reinvent the traditional construction panel on the building plans! Moreover, having the possibility to create notifications and roles per organization...

And, more generally, this conveys the idea that the project is shared between all the companies that are working together and not only the ones belonging to the project owners and architects that created it. The concept of everyone owning their data is what we really have at heart!

Archive a selection of topics

It is now possible to archive completed topic series. Is that all? Thanks to that menu, we will allow more actions on a list of topics later. Currently, it is possible to export a pdf report file and archive the topics. But more useful features will be added soon like modifying many topics at once and deleting a topic series!

Loaders to see the buffering

In most applications, you are probably used to loaders that is showing that the server is working well even if the connection is slow (or our code)! And this is changing everything. Since we implemented it, the application seems running much faster. Magical! ??

Mention all the topic contributors

Here is a little feature to communicate easier with the people interested in a topic. If you are part of a tiny group that is only interested in a specific topic, why sending to all projects members? While it is saturating the contributor's inbox, they most likely won't even read the emails if they keep receiving emails that are not concerned about.

So, to mention the contributors of a topic, you have to type the letter @ in the comment section to get access to the project user list. As well you will be given the option to send an email to this list of people that participated in one way or another in this specific topic.

What is new about the Agile BIM community?

Agile BIM shows interest! Some LinkedIn posts have been successful.

We also had quite a few proposals about where the next meetup should take place. Thank everyone! The next meetup will take place the Monday 9th of December, in Valode et Pistre, for the second time in a architecture firm place. It is very interesting that those agencies are having more and more interests into those kinds of event. Indeed the agency employees can come there after work. It is a nice way to meet people from different sudi and share about working methods. And why not promoting the agency activity in the BIM and around the agile methods.

We will see Monday how the discussion goes, if we make an Agile workshop with post-its? Or feedback? The group will decide depending if the attendees come more from the architecture or more from the agile ccommunity.

We have also reorganized our sharing tools: slack and gitbook are now available so everyone can edit. To join our community, we wrote a guide and contribution rules. We did eventually specify the license: Creative commons of course. It is important to notify it in this building world, where all the documents are rarely shared or available to everyone.

What is missing is to communicate more on Slack between meetups, and to make everyone contribute on the wiki page. No matter if it is to bring adjustments, clarification, feedback or even write factsheets.

Here you go, you know everything about what is happening for us in November. See you next year in 2020 to see what happened in this last month of 2019!