GOLDEN THREAD TASKFORCE MEETING 12-06-2025
GEORGE STEVENSON In part what I want to achieve today is for us to come up with some consensus as to what we’re doing together, but also share our experiences as well. I’ve been involved in a few things with some of the members of the team which I’m going to explain. But also, I’d like this to be a forum where we can share achievements and things that everybody is doing. Because at the end of the day we need to reinforce each other to give us confidence that we can move things forward. (shares screen).
The Golden Thread has got a number of different things that it can satisfy. Clearly the Golden Thread is mentioned and it’s largely driven by the Building Safety Act and obviously the fire safety side of things as well. But the new social housing regulation which has come in which is also looking at things from Awaab’s law which is about mould and air quality, that’s going to hit us now. There’s also things that people aren’t necessarily aware of, like the Defective Premises Act, which is another piece of the legislation that can support improvement, and overall ESG.
So, we’ve got all of these different mechanisms. As far as what can BIM4Housing and BIM In Asset Management offer, we’ve already got the relationship with the government. I think it’s been recognised that we’ve helped. And obviously we started the Golden Thread Initiative asset and survey information group about 4 years ago. A lot of you have contributed to that. And that was just a note I got from Tim Galloway saying that he felt that what we were doing was worthwhile. I think most of you are aware of the resources that we’ve got, but I’m very keen to make sure that certainly the Taskforce, you’re all fully aware of the things that we’ve already done and that you can draw on.
For example, we’ve got the Miro board. The Miro board was set up initially by Jarek and Das from David Miller Architects, when they were navigating through understanding the new regulations. And they’ve produced a Miro board which quite a few people in this group have already contributed to. But it’s a live Miro board, so if you’re interested in getting involved in that would you put ‘Miro board’ into the chat and we’ll make sure that you’re engaged with that. We’ve got a little video that Das cut a few months ago, just in one of the meetings to explain that.
So overall, why are we doing this Task Group? Obviously there’s the thing at the moment where 75% of Gateway applications are being rejected because they’ve got missing or flawed information. And also one of the shocking things about that is the number of them that were rejected because the fire safety information wasn’t right. So, that’s part of what we’re doing with this particular initial effort with the Golden Thread Taskforce, is looking at the fire safety side of things. But we’re not saying that’s what it’s all about.
We’re also finding from a very practical point of view that most asset managers are having to survey brand new buildings to produce asset lists, which is crazy. And that’s something that obviously within BIM In Asset Management we’re very keen to reverse. We’ve also got the great connections in with the BIM4Housing groups. So, the operations group, the development group met on the 29th, 2 weeks ago. And one of the things that they had decided, David Poat had already taken onboard what we’d provided them in terms of the Regulation 38 checklist. And he started to put together something that Notting Hill Genesis were going to issue to their supply chain.
And Origin Housing, or now Places For People, they’ve been doing the same thing. They’ve been upgrading their Regulation 38 checklist as well. And in the meeting we sort of agreed that it was crazy if Notting Hill Genesis and Places For People are asking for something slightly different from their supply chain. It makes a lot more sense for everybody to be aligned. So, what they agreed to do was to let us put together the information requirements and look at the Regulation 38 in particular requirements and put that together in a standardised way. And then they will then adopt that, which I think puts huge benefit and value to the work that we’re doing in this group.
What that’s going to do is make it a lot easier for supply chains to prepare the information that’s needed so that they’re not being asked by different organisations for slightly different information. It’s also going to make it a lot easier to review and audit that information. We can then automate elements of it and use AI properly to be able to get through a huge amount of information. And it also makes it a lot easier to populate other systems, which is the whole point really of the Golden Thread process. A lot of you will have already seen this, but I’m just going to run over it.
The poll that we did I think is testament to the fact that we’ve got to do something on this. Only 89% of people felt that their chief executives, or the people that control the purse strings, actually know what their liabilities are under the Building Safety Act. And then there is a range of different things which I think you’ve seen here. Do you think the fire and emergency file is going to be accurate and updated with any changes? 92% of people didn’t believe they were going to get the right Regulation 38 information. I won’t go through all of these, but I think this is valuable stuff. And we need to keep pushing this because it’s clear that the industry needs help in up-skilling.
For example, it wasn’t clear as to whether people understood that the Regulator needs to be informed when a fire door is replaced. There’s all sorts of ‘it depends’ sort of thing, but I think we need to have some sort of consistency on that. And there’s people on this call that have got absolutely the right answers to that, but other people may be asking those questions. So, that’s why the community is so important. I’m going to show quickly what we’ve been doing over this last few weeks since the last meeting.
But what we also want to do is each morning we’re going to set up a toolbox talk session where people can come along if they want and just explain any questions that they’ve got, or any answers that they’ve come up with, to celebrate success, for example. That you’ve managed to do something that you feel others might benefit from. Or conversely you’ve got a challenge and you want some help.
So, Richard and I are going to alternate between it. We’re going to be there at 8.30 every morning for the next few weeks, we’re going to give it a try, just for half an hour. And if you wish come on to the meeting. I’m not suggesting at all that everybody would be attending, it’s just t becomes a place for us to do that.
RICHARD FREER Think like a drop-in centre, you want to pop in for 10 minutes or you’ve just got a query that you might, there could be somebody on the call that could actually answer that. It’s not formal in any way, it’s a chat, but it’s an open chat for when you feel like it. Or you’re having a coffee before going to work or just as you get in and you’ve got nothing to do, pop in and see if there is anything interesting going on.
Sometimes there will be a lot of people, sometimes there won’t be any, sometimes there won’t be many, it will just be a mix. But take it as that, it’s casual. And if you’ve got an issue, or just something good that you’re proud of and you want to share, that’s a good place to do it.
GEORGE STEVENSON What we also would like to do, because we’ve been talking this through with Pencho who is the senior fire engineer. And one of the things that we’d like to be able to do is look at what information actually is needed for what purpose. So, looking at actual, real, practical examples, you know, I had this particular problem or I was asked this. And what we found is that we couldn’t find the information that we needed for whatever purpose, or we found it quite easily and it was a real success.
So, if we could think about scenarios, this happened and therefore we needed this information, it means that we’ve got something tangible we can start to use. And also can be used to train Large Language Models as well. This is what Matt, myself and Pencho from Places For people did at Digital Construction Week. We had a presence there, quite a few of the people on this call, like Phil and Paul, were also at the event. But one of the questions, we ran a panel saying why aren’t FMs using BIM models that we handover? It was standing room only the session so there was obviously a lot of interest in it.
And that’s Pencho there just detailing what he needs for Regulation 38 information. Matt Wilkie is there. And one of the things that we were doing there, you’ll have all seen this before, the principle here is actually understanding what the information in Regulation 38 is needed for. So, this is really emphasising the fact that we need all of the information in a joined up way to create a proper Golden Thread that relates different systems together, and then makes an understanding of what that asset is doing and what it’s protecting. So we can then have a range of different software that is all glueing together to do that.
And we also showed some examples of some really good information that a fire stopping contractor has provided. That they go through a serial number each of the fire stopping seals, but the challenge with it is the way that they locate that information. Which I understand why they’re doing it for their purposes, but they’ve put a single pin on a floor plan. So therefore to see where all of the pins are they’ve got to open up 1,300 floor plans, which obviously is a bit impractical. So, one of the things that we’ve done is created a routine that extracts all of those pins from the PDF reports.
That’s a bit of innovation with data engineering and bit of AI, and if you want to know how we’re doing that then put in the chat ‘fire stopping information’ and we can let you see this. But this is what we’re doing, we\re actually pulling out the individual tag numbers from the PDF report and also where they are in the floor plan. So we can then visualise that all in one go, so you can actually see which fire stop test had which information. So, you can walk along a corridor o see all of the results.
The other thing that we did at Digital Construction week, we spoke to lots of different exhibitors there, the software companies, and the thing that I find really encouraging. I don’t know what you think Phil Hannabuss from Asite, but I was really encouraged by the level of collaboration that people were willing to do. APIs were absolutely on the radar for everybody. Would you agree with that, Phil?
PHILIP HANNABUSS I personally didn’t get off the stand much at all because, without this sounding like a sales pitch, I was literally talking about our cognitive CDE the whole time, so unfortunately I didn’t really get to go around. But it’s something that we’re focused on at the moment and we did a talk about this as well, in terms of a true CDE doesn’t really matter where the data sits, as long as you’ve got a single source of access to that data. And that’s kind of what we’re positioning at the moment.
GEORGE STEVENSON So, over all for everybody I think it’s really encouraging that we’re doing that. And then just my experiences over the last few days. I was at Laing O’Rourke’s factor yesterday at the Buildoffstie event. What BOPAS do, this is an insurance scheme where they will provide 60-year warranty for anything that’s gone through the process. So, this is for offsite manufactured buildings, modular buildings and the like. And it’s got to be part of the mix going forward in terms of quality.
I’m just mentioning that because that was the event yesterday, I’m promoting the Golden Thread into these people, everybody has got a different view of the Golden Thread, but I think that’s part of our solution. And this was the factory at Laing O’Rourke. So, one of our stars here, this is Carolyn Flynn. Do you want to just explain a little bit about what we did together? Because this was a really useful thing from my perspective because I’ve never done this before. I’ve got lots of people who are very good at doing this, including people like Barry. Carolyn was steering me. Do you want to just explain why we’re doing this, Carolyn?
CAROLYN FLYNN When George approached me I thought of dipping him into the deep end of things. So, I took him to one of our sites which is quite a big site, also with loads of fire doors because it’s 11 floors. It’s in Leeds, we took George up there and we were showing him round. We managed to get, I’ve used a 360 camera before, but over here in the video what I was trying to do is to demonstrate where we’ve got the 4 boilers that we’ve got there. And it was just to demonstrate what the camera would have in its vision. And after that then we can label.
But we were trying to also show the distance, what it covers, where would be our next picture, where would we need to take our next picture. So, that’s what we’re doing and then George is going to go away and try and find the assets in that area and hopefully we can label them going forward. And be able to, obviously as you can see that’s in one of the plant rooms. Now, that site alone has got 6 plant rooms, all with various things. So, those are some of the pictures George and I took from that site.
For us it would work because obviously we would be able to show our client what we have. And when referring to an asset and its age, everybody would have that visibility of what we are referring to. And once it’s gone through all of the labelling and Golden Thread and all, we would actually be able to also show the location of where it is, is it on the 6th floor? Because it’s easier for us as an account, because obviously that’s up in Leeds, but our client is based in London, so that makes life much easier for us.
GEORGE STEVENSON So, if anybody would want to do a digital asset capture pilot like we’ve just done here with Carolyn, I think it would be useful. If you’ve got something that you’d like to try this out on, we’ve got some cameras that we can share, just put ‘DAC’ in the chat and we can organise something for you. I’m going to stop there now for questions and things, because Barry is also going to show some stuff a little bit later on as well.
RICHARD FREER We’ve covered quite a lot of ground there. Has anybody got any thoughts on anything that George has had to say? There’s been a lot of interest in the Miro board and the fire stopping information.
CHRIS COOPER I was at DCW on the Thursday and I can completely concur that there is a positive vibe. Especially regarding the Building Safety Act driving desire for collaboration and realising that you’ve got to get ahead of the digital thread. However, my concern is why are we still creating PDFs?
We need to make data machine-readable. And as a digital engineer supporting the built environment I do have a concern about the industry’s maturity in dealing with APIs and technical debt and the lifecycle of data as well. Especially when technology companies are fly by nights and tend to be disappearing within 10 years and our structures will last 200. So, I appreciate anyone’s thoughts on digital adoption and APIs, love it, but we also need to manage technical debt.
RICHARD FREER A very good point. I’ll say briefly on that, certainly it’s always been our mission to make all information machine-readable. What’s happened over the last few years is that we’ve come to the realisation that that’s great, but it’s not going to happen immediately and we have to also be aware that we have to work in the old economy to some extent as well. George, what do you think about that?
GEORGE STEVENSON I think there’s two things. One is, as Richard is saying, we’ve got existing buildings and we have to be able to do this for existing buildings as well, Chris. And obviously there’s very few models for existing buildings. The second thing, which actually is more troubling and more challenging, is that the deliverable that everybody is creating is a PDF drawing or a PDF schedule. People are unwilling to provide the native data, to the extent that the very common practice is to strip out sheets from models because the IP of the drawings, and also the concern about people modifying things afterwards, is still very strong.
So, I think that’s something that we need to bear in mind. I’m passionately, anybody that’s been involved with me over the last 5 years on this, you’ll know that I’m always talking about machine-readable data. But in practice that may not be the case.
MANDEEP SINGH A good point there by Chris about people obviously still using PDFs. And one of the things that I’ve noticed is that industry is so stubborn. Where the Golden Thread guidance has stipulated to use electronic facility, rather than people using PDFs which are intelligent or collecting data in forms which can be translated into intelligent readable information, they’re actually now scanning their paper forms or taking pictures of their digital forms and then uploading those on electronic facility.
So, it’s interesting the way that industry is going to have to drag them across the line, but obviously in this situation I completely appreciate why we have to do it, as George said, for the older buildings. But the point I was going to ask about that camera was how does that camera work in terms of the coordination? What I’m trying to get to is you’ve got stuff like the BLK360 which will be a lot more expensive. It will take your pictures, but also it can give you accurate point cloud data with millimetre accuracy. Does that camera have that same kind of functionality?
GEORGE STEVENSON No, that camera I was using there is a Ricoh 360 and it’s about £300. A BLK is probably nearer £30,000.
PIERRE VENTER Just in response to some of Chris’ comments. I made a comment in the chat, it’s about the impact of the decision and data capture on two streams, one which says at the beginning of the lifecycle of the project all the way through, with the different handovers. The second one is when we do it at handover, in other words a photogrammetry AR?AI? 27 minutes 54 secs collection etc. What are the differences? And the part here is about the measurement, what’s the input, the effort resources that go into it and what the deliverable is.
Now, if we want to go to the Golden Thread that’s important because we’re putting in things based on performance initially and then on a product at the end. And we need to glue that, which is going to be in my opinion part of what the Golden Thread actually does. One of the things that we have got a serious problem with is there’s not enough existing building records digitally available. I’ve just been looking at a facade remediation project here in London. It’s by a certain company as an asset, it’s student accommodation. The problem is there’s no records apparently.
In other words part of this exercise, we need to take some initiative from Dubai and have a digital repository. How that gets managed, that’s a much bigger question.But what it means is that from all the planning, all of the operations potential future predictive work etc. Part of that thing about capturing information is that we’ve got large numbers of residential developments which there’s huge potential for. Again, something that’s got to be discussed. PDF and naive data, the one problem that I have is that the PDF is an auditable and fixed record. So, there is a place for it to be there.
But at the same time, we need to start using IFC and native data that can actually perform inter-operably. And the part there George, we’ve discussed it previously about blockchain and locking these things, so that we have that record. And that would be another study by itself to make sure, it makes everybody much more confident that the IP is not getting lost and that they have ownership still on that particular copyright that they have.
PHILIP HANNABUSS The one thing that made me put my hand up was the question about Chris talking about tech companies not lasting very long. Asite have been around for 25 years, we’re the only independently owned tech company and I know there are a number of others. But even when you look at that what’s happening is a lot of companies are changing the way and pivoting, because they’re being bought out by other companies, changing their names and so on. And that is where they’re being lost from, so that’s one thing to take onboard.
And the other part of that is the reason that a lot of these new startup tech companies are failing is because people don’t understand the value in what they’re actually providing. So, when you’re looking at cost comparison between two applications and one is more expensive that the other, the commercial people are going right, we’ll go for the cheaper one and not understanding the value of what it can and can’t do. And in some instances, those are things like difficulty, like Pierre mentioned and George was mentioning, of having two files associated with each other, the PDF and the native file, where they can actually be received.
Some companies just cannot do that which is why it’s too difficult to share that information. And then they share uncontrolled copies outside of the CDE environment. And this is the problem that we face all the time is that ultimately it’s very difficult in some cases to get people to understand the value of what they’re buying when all they see is the pound signs.
RICHARD FREER Absolutely. I just want to go back to Mandeep briefly, Barry has put a reply into the chat. Regarding 360 cameras, it’s entirely possible to achieve 360 camera positions within a few centimetres of accuracy if that level of precision is required. Barry will be covering that in the next DAC masterclass. The big issue with it capturing 360 images isn’t the camera, but knowing where they are taken so that you can position them. if anybody is interested in joining the DAC masterclass, put ‘masterclass’ in the chat.
GEORGE STEVENSON I want to just ask Matt Wilkie, is it worth you reprising the door example? If I put this up can you just speak to it? (shares screen).
MATT WILKIE So, on this one, what you’ve got is you imagine a hospital or clinic can have more than one front door. And what the reporting often is is the front door is faulty, but there could be multiple receptions, so everybody has got the front door that is nearest to them. Now, it has two impacts, operationally and from a lifecycle perspective, if the doors aren’t actually documented correctly. The first thing is that you may get call outs and the engineers are fixing the wrong door, which is quite common.
You can also get the fact that you don’t know which door is actually regularly faulty because you may want a door that is always breaking down to change that one out. But you lose the transparency across the fact that you’ve got multiple doors. And from a lifecycle perspective, it also means you can have a similar issue of replacing the wrong doors or you’re not sure which ones are problematic doors because you may be trying to extend the life of the doors as well.
I chose this scenario because it’s a simple one, but it gets bigger and bigger as you move into things like fire doors and internal doors because you sometimes have say corridor 4, which may have 20 doors in it, and it says door replacement where there not logged and matching the drawings etc. And you can have defects, issues with the doors or things are not fire doors that should be fire doors and stuff that’s actually down as a fire door that isn’t a fire door. So, this one is a typical example. The FD on the drawing is actually not fire door, it’s actually first floor door 2.
So, the point is that even naming conventions, you have to be very careful that they’re actually correct and in line with what you need. But what you find with fire door contractors, they’re often not given the drawings with the numbering and naming conventions on the drawings. So what you’ll have a is contractor will come in and go OK, didn’t provide any information, they’ll just start from the front of the building and go through door 1, door 2, door 3, up to door 100, 200.
The problem with that is it doesn’t correlate to the drawings unless you send the drawings over to them and ask them to match the doors back up. And even then it can be a bit problematic depending the drawings have been kept up-to-date as well. So, it is important that the doors are correct, but it also means that if you can tie it together with the original door schedules you can actually make sure that the ironmongery and everything that’s associated with that specific door is correct as well. Because a lot fo stuff seems to appear on doors from screw fix which may not be correct for that specific door type.
GEORGE STEVENSON The other thing I would just reinforce on what Matt has just said that I think is really important. There’s a huge amount of effort gone in by the industry, particularly the door manufacturers, to create their own Golden Threads. Now, that’s no bad thing, but the problem is that the information that they’re capturing is typically locked in an individual app. And because of that it’s not being shared back, as Matt is saying, into the master information model. And the only way you can see the information about those doors is through the app that the organisation who has done the inspections, for example, have created.
And then if they lose the contract and somebody else picks the contract up in five years’ time, when they then go through they may use, even if they use the same application the numbering will be different. So, what it’s really important to do, as Matt was saying, everything needs to be referenced back to the original GA and the original asset information so that any inspection that takes place next year, 5 years’ time, 10 years’ time, is always against that same unique asset. So, that’s part of what we’re trying to achieve.
MATT WILKIE I think the other thing there, is why we end up with so many PDFs as well. Because they then will print them to PDFs so they’ve got a document of each door, which then ends up in not a true document in the sense of a digital one, but a copy of a door.
GEORGE STEVENSON Sure, thank you. Barry has got some examples of something else that he’s been doing this last couple of weeks.
BARRY BASSNETT (shares screen). Can you see a fire extinguisher? OK, this is just leading in to the digital asset capture workshop. What we’ve just heard about is about locating doors and things, this applies for any way of navigating your building. And the masterclass that we’ll be doing will be looking at 360 imagery and how we can use it. And there’s some very simple things that confuse people a lot, like some of the field capture techniques. Like which direction is my 360 image actually pointing? Is it north, south, east or west? That can be very confusing.
How can I get myself out of the image? We’ll be covering that as well and we’ll be covering some of the more arcane things about 360 like how to manage them all. This is just one example of a thing that I’m doing at the moment for asset management, it’s actually a converting paper mill. Just to show you the level of detail that you can get and how far you can zoom in to get detail. But one thing that you’ll notice about this is I’m not in any of the pictures. And this is fine when you’ve got things to hide behind, but if I’m doing a big hall or something, you press the button and then you’ve got to run to hide away. You don’t need to do that.
So, we’ll be covering how we can get around that and remove the camera operator from the image. So, you don’t have to keep running around and hiding behind a cupboard or shut the door or whatever. But this is a job that I’m doing, it’s asset management to solve a particular problem. In this case what we’ve been asked to do is map all of the places where they need to put lubrication. But also after they’ve done that, they also want to use it manage all of the fire equipment assets that they’ve got. So, obviously you’ve got the extinguishers, but then you’ve got all of the fire suppression systems in the roof and stuff like that.
And you can see that you get a really good quality of detail from these 360 cameras and just navigate through it. So, really I just wanted to introduce what we’re going to be doing and the thing that we’re going to be covering at the asset capturing workshop. Where we’re focusing on 360, how you can get this sort of image, how you can remove people. But more importantly, how do you make life simple for you? If you put the camera on the floor, quite often you don’t know where north or south is, so I’ll be showing you through some practical applications of how it can work and you can get great images from it. I look forward to seeing you on the 29th.
GEORGE STEVENSON Barry, the other thought that we had was that we’ve got that plant room that we’re looking to tag up. So, I was looking to get some volunteers maybe from this group, who’d be interested next week or the week after in getting involved in a workshop on that. Are you able to show anything of that?
BARRY BASSNETT Not on this computer, no. If anybody is interested just drop me a line and we can show them. And we’ll prepare some 360s so it’s a plant room to tag up. The plant room in mind is a data centre that we’ve been working on. It’s really just to show people how easy it is just to tag things up remotely and pass it over to different subject matter experts. Because you may want to have different subject matter experts tagging up this, who’ve got expertise in certain things like fire engineering or structural engineering or whatever.
GEORGE STEVENSON I think it’s more building services. So, if there’s anybody on the call that is knowledgeable about pumps and building services and ventilation and things like that, or sprinkler systems and the like, then if you’re interested in participating in spending an hour or so with Barry and me on this data centre project, then that might be something that you would find useful. Just put your name in saying ‘tagging’.
RICHARD FREER So, anybody who’s interested in the master class on the digital asset capture and cameras, out ‘master class’ in the chat. Anybody who’s interested in what George has just been talking about with Barry put ‘tagging’ in the chat. The masterclass is on the 27th.
GEORGE STEVENSON The other thing is if anybody wants to borrow a 360 camera to do what Caroline and I did, if you put ‘pilot’.
RICHARD FREER Just put ‘pilot’ if you’re interested in joining that pilot scheme whereby you borrow a camera with a bit of instruction and try it out for yourself. The other things we’ve got in the chat are the Miro board, and the last one is fire stopping information.
OK, the Das meeting, we had a very good meeting yesterday with Das who is the lead of theBIM4Housing design group. They came up with a couple of things in discussion with George that we made a note of as to be relevant for this meeting and we’d be interested to hear your view of that. Now, this is just my reminders, so George will probably have to translate it into something that makes some sense. We’re finding that a lot of people are capturing information on OpenSpace, purely to get evidence of what subbies have actually been doing.
Now, this is useful for asset teams, but unfortunately they don’t like to share that information because it could be used as evidence against them. So, valuable information is being lost through a loss of trust. Now George, I seem to recall during the meeting yesterday that you had a solution for that. Perhaps you could explain the problem better than I have and the solution that you have for that.
GEORGE STEVENSON It’s not just OpenSpace, by the way. The good news is that all of the major systems like Oculo, Buildox and Disperse, there’s half a dozen of them or so, and actually Plan Radar has just launched their own version of it as well. So, the principle is that normally their customer is the construction company and they’re doing it to hold their supply chain to account. But they’re nervous about making all of that available to everybody, so just in case something is there that there could be a problem with. And the solution is that they can be selective in terms of which of the photos that they reveal.
The point is that if, for example, it can go through and identify a particular 360 that shows the assets that were there before the ceiling was installed, or before it was closed out, the contractor can decide which ones they want to share. So, they don’t have to share everything. Now, you might argue that they should share everything on an open basis, but we’re in a very contractual litigious environment, so I can understand their concerns on that. So, that overcomes that particular problem, but to some extent it comes back to the fact that we need to start to be more collaborative and less adversarial in terms of how we’re doing this because otherwise it’s going to drive people out of the way.
RICHARD FREER So basically what you’re saying is we can share, but it’s possible to be selective in what is shared so that there is no risk involved in doing the sharing.
GEORGE STEVENSON Yeah, exactly, and it comes back to people like Phil Asite who are experts in the common data environment space where you have basically sections that are accessible to clients. The clients don’t see everything, do they, Phil?
PHILIP HANNABUSS No, not at all, you’re right. Ultimately you can have all of your access permissions based on all of the folders, the work spaces that you’re looking into. So you can completely control all of that data, what they see and what they’re not allowed to see and how they’re allowed to interact with the data that’s on there.
GEORGE STEVENSON The important point is that we’ve got a number of different people that are raising these points. So, to some extent the morning meetings are probably going to reveal a lot of this sort of stuff, things that you’re coming across on a daily basis and you think hmm, I wonder how we deal with that. And it’s something that we could then share.
RICHARD FREER It’s…to put out to the wider community, it’s just a way of being very, very current. You’ve got an issue that arose yesterday, or you’ve been thinking about overnight, well, share it with us and who knows. There could be somebody on the call or somebody that we could reach later in the day potentially even, who could possibly answer that problem.
GEORGE STEVENSON Some of you know, in fact I’ve had 14 or 15 brief one-to-one meetings this week alone, and that’s been very helpful for me understanding what you each want to do. And I think that it’s been helpful to the individuals as well. I’m going to roll that out, so if anybody hasn’t had a one-to-one meeting with me we can have one-to-ones over the next few days. So, I’m going to open up a Doodle poll on that so that you can pick a 15 minute meeting with me, if that would be useful.
What I will do in that meeting is explain on a more direct basis what it is that we’re each doing. And also to understand what you want to do. And we’ve also produced a 20 minute video, so it’s quite long, it’s not something that we’re using for marketing purposes. But the objective of it is to let people understand, it provides a resource for people to get their colleagues maybe to get involved. So, what I’d like to do is suggest that you come along to that one-to-one and we can go from there.
The other thing I would say is that if you’ve got somebody that you would normally refer to, if you’ve got colleagues that you would ask about the Golden Thread, or people that you now may want to know about the Golden Thread, could you put their names in the chat. Because what we’re trying to is increase the community of people that are on the same wavelength as us. So, if you’ve got somebody that you would normally turn to ask a question about the Building Safety Act or fire safety or whatever, if you put their name in the chat we can invite them along and they can then be part of the community.
And on that point, I’m just going to hand over briefly to Mandeep because I was taking to Mandeep this morning about how we can standardise a lot of the Regulation 38 stuff. Mandeep, you had some really good ideas on that.
MANDEEP SINGH Obviously we’ve got the Regulation 38 and then just to be clear, there’s two Regulation 38s that deal with information handover. The first one is, as we all know, the building regulations which deals with fire information. And then you’ve got Regulation 38 in the high-risk building procedures which deals with actually the kind of Golden Thread of information and the B-FLOW information which is to do with ventilation, overheating, mechanical services and all of that kind of stuff.
So, what me and George were talking about earlier this morning was almost like a kind of template standardisation of a workflow where I’d say to start with we’d probably not tackle the whole Golden Thread. But if we tackled a smaller subsection like the fire & emergency file and then worked that through to give an example for the industry of what we would expect in a standard fire & emergency file that might be a good place to start. And then what we’re potentially discussing was mapping out a few things to create a whole workflow.
So, I’ve just been scribbling a few things down after I spoke to George, in terms of ideas. But the first thing we’ll talk about is the fire & emergency file and what kind of assets would be covered in the fire & emergency file. So, we’d identify the assets, then the second step would be to identify the information deliverables which are kind of related to those assets. And then the third part of it would be how do you practically actually put this in place to tie it in with information management principles. And this would be veru open, so those information management principles would apply to any common data environment, so it would really drive the industry.
And I think that’s the key thing is how do we tie this all back to information management because at the end of the day we’re a BIM task group. As part of that as well we’d probably tie in stuff like the master information delivery plans, task information delivery plans. And then patch on the kind of philosophy of BS8644 as well. So, it’s maybe creating a whole kind of worksheet to guide people through what constitutes a good fire & emergency file. And obviously, the fire & emergency file, the kind of backbone to the Building Safety Act really is the Hackitt report.
And I think we need to refer to the different sources to get a good comprehensive overview of what should be as part of a fire & emergency file, rather than looking at the legislation which is pretty brief. And I think one of the concepts as part of the fire & emergency file is how we use intelligent, which we touched on earlier, the metadata to search for information. So, what we mentioned earlier is about multiple version of the truth. I don’t care where that truth exists, in might not be in your CDE, it might be in a separate system.
But as long as we can point people to those kind of versions of the truth and then search for that information using metadata, that truth should only exist in one place. It doesn’t matter where it is. But if we can start doing that then what that helps us do is when you’ve got stuff like O&M manuals, O&M manuals are great and they’ve got their own cause which is what operation and maintenance. But in the Hackitt report it also recommends O&M manuals are part of the fire & emergency file.
So what we need to do is have a mechanism where we assign metadata to information so it can be filtered for the cause which is needed. So for example, if I say this is part of the fire & emergency file and O&M stuff, depending on what container I choose it should be able to sort the information for me. But I feel like the industry isn’t grasping this kind of use of metadata at the moment and I think that’s what we need to spell out. And I think that would be a good drive to the industry to set up a bit of a benchmark.
GEORGE STEVENSON Mandeep has offered to coordinate a little workstream on that. So, if you’re interested in standardising fire & emergency files, for example, if you put ‘standardisation’ into the chat. If that’s something that you’re interested in either contributing to or consuming, put it in. Remember, we’re all volunteers here, so everybody is putting their time and effort in, but you’ve got a quid pro quo getting stuff out of it.
PAV SINGH PHULL We’re restricting, I understand that we’re talking about Golden Thread at this moment in time. But just remember the principles that you’re gathering, if you gather the modules there are elements that impact CDM regulations as well, effective health & safety files, low-rise buildings and other parts. And my request is if you’re looking at a wider group I would love for you to turn it, I don’t know how to have a conversation. If you say Golden Thread, automatically they look at it’s a client requirement, it’s linked to the building safety regulations, but the rest of the industry will benefit from this working group, if you don’t mind.
And I think there is a gap of having our own terminology of Golden Thread lite/light? 1 hr 40 secs that will cut across all industry, all of the BIM stuff, have coordinated good asset information that improves health & safety. If you don’t mind, if you can extend it just that much, that would be really helpful.
GEORGE STEVENSON Pav, absolutely, I think you know that I’m looking at things from the wider perspective as well (and I think that we all are). But what I was trying to do, what’s shocked me in reviewing several of these projects that are being handed over, is that the most straightforward and clear thing that should be being done isn’t being done.
And I found it quite shocking, really, that the fire safety side of things, which after the last 4 years I’m amazed that people aren’t taking it adequately seriously. Or maybe misunderstanding or whatever. So, what we’re trying to do is if we can get the Regulation 38 stuff right, then that builds a lot more that can be addressed. So, I’m absolutely onboard with what you’re saying, Pav.
RICHARD FREER It’s the question of getting something nailed, that’s what it comes down to, we can build from that slowly out, but just to get something nailed. Because at the moment, there’s not much of that.
GEORGE STEVENSON One of the challenges, most organisations last week at the DCW were talking about the Golden Thread. So, it’s great that people are recognising it, but everybody is interpreting it differently. And the whole point about this task group is for us as a community to actually have a common understanding of what it’s about and then we stand a chance of delivering it.
PHILIP HANNABUSS One of the big things that I see a lot is that people still don’t know where their information resides. We’re still in a world of silos and nobody produces an information web diagram to see where all of that information is. So people just don’t know what they don’t know, and nobody seems to ever ask.
KEVIN BAYLISS One thing about health & safety files, because I’m working through stuff at the moment, written some stuff on Golden Thread working with client’s stuff. One of the elements is that we’ve also been looking at health & safety file unoccupied/in occupied? 1hr 3mins 37secs buildings. And as part of that is the fact that what sits in a health & safety file, OK we have all of the various information, as-builts and all of that kind of stuff, But one of the key elements is the risk elements that are more the softer information, shall we say, about elements so say look, how do I access that?
You need to be aware of that when you go to site. Not specifically just warrantees and things like that which is fine. I think there is a challenge also of understanding that stuff, so somebody is looking at an element and going actually, there is an access issue there, or the designer has done that. So, that softer information as part of that element also needs to be considered and think about how that goes on.
And the only one point I was going to make, Golden Thread, we need to determine, everyone talks about the Golden Thread, the Golden Thread is compliance and elements. I think there are elements also about maintenance and day-to-day maintenance and we have to define with the AP and there needs to be a system to say look actually, this is Golden Thread. This is stuff that ? 1hr 4 mins 39 secs Golden Thread, as per it says in the CSCL document in August last year. So, I think we need to be clear about what is Golden Thread in terms of compliance and what is about general maintenance.
RICHARD FREER So, a quick reminder of the last couple to put in the chat. George’s one-to-one, put ‘one-to-one’ in the chat. Mandeep’s standardisation workstream, put ‘standardisation’ in the chat. Now, this is a very lively group as you can appreciate and we want to keep that going, so the next meeting will be in approximately three weeks, we’ll keep you posted and please watch out for those invites. Thank you very much indeed for what has been an excellent meeting.
GEORGE STEVENSON If you've not provided your WhatsApp details, if you could also do that because we want to use the WhatsApp to pull people together as well. And remember that from Monday we're going to be running the 8.30 meetings. I’m not quite sure how we’re going to do that, Richard.
RICHARD FREER Don’t worry about that, you’ll be getting a link which you will be able to click on at any point over the next X number of months to join the 8.30 morning coffee break live with who knows who, maybe you.
CHAT
Nikki Barrow (Unverified) 11:12 am
Is there a figure for how many people answered this survey as a control group?
Victoria Finn (External) 11:14 am
open group sounds similar to what the fire service are doing- very useful
Alozie Ohuonu (Unverified) 11:16 am
Sounds interesting. How does one get involved in these open groups?
Gough, Terry (NORTH WEST ANGLIA NHS FOUNDATION TRUST) (Unverified) 11:16 am
Anyone in the group currently working on a new build hospital which is a HRB., be great to get thoughts.
Victoria Finn (External) 11:18 am
Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service (GMFRS) Higher Risk Team
Philip Hannabuss (External) 11:23 am
Were the photos from a 360 camera?
Pierre Venter (External) 11:25 am
The Impact of the Decision to collect from the start vs at the Handover. Cost, Values and worth at all milestones and the final deliverable. We need to collect info for that comparison. Incl. Input Effort/Resources and the Deliverables. Project Timeline and milestones list with values would be a good comparison.
Gareth Grimes (External) 11:25 am
I'm using a 360 on a new build scheme to record fire stopping so happy to help.
Modupe Sobowale (External) 11:25 am
Based in London and interested in DAC with Caroline.
Andy Cumberpatch (External) 11:26 am
We have a 360 camera, but also looking at 3d scanning
Joe Stott (External) 11:32 am
The requirement for none editable formats for deliverables is driven by PI providers - not sure how we move this conversation forward other that Intergrated Project Insurance. https://youtu.be/EVIh4P8GyS4?si=4X97zDQCgpNuix25
Modupe Sobowale (External) 11:33 am
Edited
Smart contract is good.
Joe Stott (External) 11:33 am
blockchain could certainly assist towards some movement in this area
Barry (Unverified) 11:33 am
Regarding 360 cameras, it is entirely possible to achieve 360 camera positions with a few centimetres of accuracy if that level of precision is required. I'll be covering that in the next DAC masterclass. The big issue with capturing 360 images isn't the camera but knowing where they are taken so you can position them
Chris Cooper (External) 11:36 am
Maybe one for the regulator to step up to and provide that forever service a blockchain would need to be in place for.
Joe Stott (External) 11:37 am
You would imagine it would be in the PI providers to drive adoption of something like this
Philip Hannabuss (External) 11:41 am
This is a very common issue, we still live and work in too many silos
Pierre Venter (External) 11:41 am
The naming standard is at fault. 1F-ZONE-D#03
Add these to the key requirements for our proposals
Philip Hannabuss (External) 11:41 am
we need and should encourage amore connected approach
Andy Cumberpatch (External) 11:42
I think this is why we are all here to try and do this
Philip Hannabuss (External) 11:42 am
this does not mean moving data all to one system, the importance is the connections of the systems that handle their respective data together
Pierre Venter (External) 11:45 am
There is an application previously by Arup. now by Ideagen. Mail Manager. one Feature that is very powerful. The attachments are reduced to links and stored once.
The forwarded mail, to a list is managed, but if someone forwards it to a 3rd party, its outside the thread. If there is an update the 3rd party is included.. This is a SMART feature. FYI
Jeslin Joy (External) 11:46
Agreed - data interoperability is key. As a group, if we can align on a standard asset data model and baseline requirements for a fire door including how naming conventions are defined that would be a significant step forward.
Chris Jeffers (External) 11:47 am
At Motts we certainly have team members who would be very interested in learning more on plant room asset capture
Philip Hannabuss (External) 11:47 am
as an FYI - This is something we are working on and growing constantly from Emails to share-point and all in between
Eyden, Paul (External) 11:50 am
ISO 4157, is a bit old but provides the framework for a room numbering convention.
Philip Hannabuss (External) 12:01 pm
Mandeep Singh i would be happy to showcase what can be done around midps etc?
Chris Jeffers (External) 12:07 pm
Agree with that re softer info and we should be picking this up as part of soft landings work…
Pierre Venter (External) 10:44 pm
The meta data is updated, with the spatial structure as you identified. The tag is lean, reflecting the ordering. Padding and concatenation symbols. We do need to provide this at each job to get it embedded in the psyche