The Brick Consortium #

The Brick Consortium, Inc. is a non-profit membership corporation whose purpose is to encourage the research and development of Brick Schema Specifications for the built environment and any supporting tooling, documentation, and best practices necessary to promote Brick. The consortium develops the Brick Schema Specifications as open source through member participation.

The consortium, through the Brick schema, addresses an important industry and societal need by helping to make data of the built environment interoperable. The consortium is made up of researchers, technology providers, integrators, and building operators, and will serve as an organization that can provide the long-term support necessary to maintain and enhance the Brick schema until 2040 and beyond. The consortium provides governance for the Brick Schema specifications and conformance testing protocols, and provides tooling and a repository of reference models and canonical use cases. The consortium also funds the research of work related to Brick and the built environment and works to evangelize the use of the Brick schema.

The consortium is committed to ensuring the Brick specification is not encumbered with proprietary intellectual property.

The rules of the consortium are available for review, as is a membership form. We hosted a virtual open house in 2021, and the video and slides are available.

Commerical Members

Academic Individual Researcher

The organization of the Brick Consortium. #

The Board of Directors #

The Board of Directors of the Brick Consortium is only responsible for corporate governance and government filings. The Board of Directors does not have any influence on the Brick schema.

The Steering Committee #

The operations of the Brick Consortium are overseen by a Steering Committee. The Steering Committee approves new technical areas for the consortium to work in and sets the membership fees. There are up to seven seats on the Steering Committee.

The Technical Committee, Technical Services Committee, and Communications Committee #

The main work of the Brick Consortium is managed by three committees.

The Technical Committee oversees the development of the Brick Schema. The Technical Committee, from time to time, determines when the Brick Schema should be put out to the full Consortium membership for a vote for a new release. The Technical Committee can also propose new areas for the Consortium to work in, subject to approval by the Steering Committee.

The Technical Services Committee will be responsible for developing conformance specifications and testing protocols.

The Communications Committee will be responsible for the Brick public presence and educating the community about Brick and the latest developments.

Working Groups #

The Technical Committee (and other committees) can charter working groups to engage the membership and open source community on development of the Brick standard. At present, there are four working groups: the Ontology Development working group, the Tools working group, the Public Dataset working group, and the Applications and Analytics working group. The working groups are developing open source software and documentation and participation is welcome from anyone, not just formal members of the Brick Consortium.

Membership in Brick #

Membership in the Brick Consortium is open to commercial entities, universities and non-profit research institutions, and individual academic researchers. Membership for commercial entities is available as a full member or a contributing member. A contributing member does not have the right to vote for the Steering Committee or to chair committees, but is otherwise fully eligible to participate. Universities and non-profit institutions do not pay any membership fees. In some cases, individual academic researchers may join in lieu of their institution joining.

All Brick consortium members have the right to vote on new releases of the Brick standard and can fully participate in the development of the standard

To Join #

For information on joining the Brick Consortium, please contact info@brickschema.org