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Last edited 30 Jan 2021

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Paul Thistlethwaite Other Consultant

A breakthrough in sharing best practice with the new BREEAM Wiki

We are now in a world where we see an increasing number of open-source solutions, where skilled professionals give freely and voluntarily towards resources available to all. Popular examples include Linux operating system and, of course, Wikipedia itself. What motivates busy, skilled professionals to give up their free time to help out? Open source contributors cite many benefits, including gaining experience, deepening understanding, promoting the open-source culture and giving back to the community. The new BREEAM Wiki (www.breeam.com/wiki) is such an outlet for sustainable construction and the April 2018 launch saw a collection of over 150 articles already created - and growing.

1 Sharing best practice and lessons learnt
2 Making it easy to share
3 Sharing what is most useful
4 Accessible platform with great visibility on search engines
5 Crowdsourcing and quality
6 5 easy ways to engage today

[edit] Sharing best practice and lessons learnt

Lessons learnt that are not passed on often result in repeated mistakes. This happens within teams but also across an industry. There is a lot of ‘reinventing the wheel’. But what if there were a simple mechanism for capturing lessons and best practice? Your project could benefit from the lessons of hundreds of projects, not just your own.

[edit] Making it easy to share

Of course, if disseminating lessons were that simple, it would already be widespread, so what stops it from happening? Time and conflicting priorities, probably urgent deadlines and immediate concerns can get in the way of thinking about capturing experience. But what if sharing a lesson was as a simple as making a note in a book? You can register to use the BREEAM Wiki in two minutes and the multiple-author articles mean you can make a single line ‘tip’ to an existing article just as quickly.

[edit] Sharing what is most useful

Wiki articles can sometimes veer towards the aspirational, but evidence compiled by Designing Buildings Wiki shows that the most read articles are those that address the immediate concerns on a project. The BREEAM Wiki, with multiple author articles, encourages content that covers the most immediately useful topics for sustainable construction projects. These include our Issue Support Documents which contain guidance and best practice relating directly to individual sustainability topics.

[edit] Accessible platform with great visibility on search engines

BREEAM Wiki is hosted on the established Designing Buildings Wiki which now has over 6.5 million unique users per year. It also has great search engine visibility and, because that is the way most people reach any online content, this means BREEAM Wiki articles will appear high in search engine results. Try typing a BREEAM Wiki article title into a search engine and see for yourself.

[edit] Crowdsourcing and quality

A functioning wiki captures the integrated wisdom of the crowd; the more people exposed to the content the more representative and accurate it can become. When people use a wiki they know it is exactly that, which encourages a critical eye rather than blind acceptance. If you see anything incorrect it can be immediately corrected. In fact, a wiki can help bring any myths or misunderstandings to the surface where they can be corrected, instead of being left unchecked.