Architects seem to act in a ‘us vs them’ way to other architects. I’ll bet that this is the case in lots of other industries but if we want to see the explosive growth that we see in software-backed industries we need to be different.

I don’t think that it should be an ‘us vs them’ situation. I prefer to think about it as ‘us vs nature’. When there are more of us then it becomes easier to overcome nature.

Open source (OS) web technology has changed the way that the world works. Something like 90% of the internet is run on Linux servers, with OS software. This culture has led to commercial companies like Twitter sharing things like their Bootstrap library. This kind of thing has made it super easy to set up a good looking website and to get yourself out on the internet.

This hasn’t cost Twitter anything extra, they were doing it anyway! It has unlocked huge amounts of value for other people. That’s just a simple example but there are thousands of others out there.

Nothing like that exists for architecture.

There are a couple of companies out there that are doing open source design work. (wikihouse.cc, paperhouses.co, Domus: Open Source Architecture (OSArc), Open Architecture Network: Temporary dormitories for CDC School, openstructures.net and a bunch of others that I’m missing out through sheer laziness!) I’m a huge fan of the the work they are doing, but I don’t think that the industry is ready for them. There are lower hanging fruit!

Architects compete on lots of dimensions. Mostly it’s cost, but we’d prefer to claim that it’s design quality. I’d like it to be mostly design quality. Anything that our industry can do to reduce costs from non-design things is a Good Thing.

One of the things that we spend time on is admin. That’s a super broad term. It could mean cleaning the office and buying paper clips, or it could mean coordinating documents. It’s possible to compete on the ability to get your admin done faster and better than the next person. I don’t want to be that guy!

That’s why, at BVN, we’ve decided to start open sourcing some of our assets. It’s going to be a slow start! We’re going to identify things that don’t really give us a competitive advantage, and share them.

Hopefully this will prompt others to do the same. Over time we can make pull requests against each other’s assets and make them better. Imagine if we can make common, super-assets out of the best bits.

This uses the web concept of paving the cow paths. That means that standards emerge out of what people are already doing. I have a lot of respect for standards organisations but they are rarely fast enough to be meaningful. This allows people to adopt what they find useful and ignore what they don’t.

We’re going to try to open up more of our assets over time. If other practices adopt them then that’s great! Hopefully it’ll help them. It’ll also help us if we ever work with someone who uses the same assets and protocols. Because we’ll have a common language it’ll reduce friction at the boundary between us.

Check out the first thing we’ve opened, our style guide. Keep an eye out for more!

We’d love for people to fork this, make contributions etc. The repo is here. It’s by no means perfect, we’re taking a launch early and often approach. There will be modifications and new sections made quite frequently for the foreseeable future.