On giant spaghetti and BIM User groups…

My friend Bhanu presented last night at the buildingSMART user group’s monthly meeting.

An enthusiastic Revit supporter, I respect Bhanu also for his open-mindness and preparedness to listen to alternative ideas. So, I went along.

I was also interested to see where he’d taken the ‘giant bowl of spaghetti project’ we jointly started up about a year ago and I had abandoned while still at the earth-worm stage.  

Bhanu duly acknowledged my presence (thank you) and certainly impressed me with the completed file. 

Clash detection give-or-take, this spin-able, coordinated digital model was well worth the effort. Especially when I recall the media used for design interpretation prior to Bhanu’s model being in existence. 

Admittedly, there was a pretty good Sketchup model coming from one of the specialists, a petty for all, that due to its heaviness, no computer could manipulate it within the office.

Driving home, another question kept annoying me: ‘BIM user groups’.

Why are they called such?

Shouldn’t they be ‘BIM practitioners’ groups’ instead?

The latter term sounds more appropriate to me, yet ‘BIM user groups’ prevail in all searches I’ve conducted.

It may just be an innocent residue from dominant software user-assembly naming practices, I wonder.

Unless, of course the members boldly wish to convey a message I was so far unaware of.

‘We use BIM to achieve something!’…

But what?

Hmmm…