Coalition for Smarter Buildings Announces SmarterTogether:
A Community-Sourced Initiative To Drive Open Best Practices and Standards for Smarter Buildings
From the Coalition for Smarter Buildings
20 March 2023
Today, the Coalition for Smarter Buildings (C4SB) announced SmarterTogether, a community-sourced, multi-pronged, multi-year initiative to collect and drive open best practices and standards for smarter buildings. The initiative furthers the Coalition’s mission to promote and enable smarter buildings’ widespread adoption and benefits – such as achieving ESG goals, more efficient operations, and more enjoyable occupant experiences – to millions of buildings, and the millions of people who use them, worldwide.
The SmarterTogether Initiative builds on two years of effort and contributions from industry experts and passionate people, hundreds of whom convened at the inaugural Smarter Summit, at the AHR Expo in Atlanta, GA, Feb 5, 2023. The process of collecting, defining, refining, and sharing a set of open resources will be ongoing, expand, and continue as long as buildings advance and get smarter.
Defining characteristics and strengths of C4SB’s efforts are being open, interoperable, and inclusive: open, as in open-sourced, to help promote barrier-free ways to contribute to and get benefit from the smarter building knowledge base; interoperable, to connect all the various parts together to make a smarter whole; and inclusive, to tap into the collective expertise and passion of as many people as possible, as all the initiatives announced today are sourced from the community.
SmarterTogether includes activities and resources such as:
| Smarter Building Vision | A statement expressing what is possible when buildings are smarter. |
| The Smarter Stack | A depiction of the new, horizontal data architecture needed for modern smarter building solutions. |
| The DIV25.25 Framework | A resource to help owners ask for, and vendors provide, smarter building solutions of composable components aligned with The Smarter Stack. |
| The OpenAppliance Project | Defining an appliance that acts as a common place to securely deploy, connect, and manage multiple smarter building systems and connect to the cloud. |
| The OpenIDL Project | Defining the importance and performance characteristics of a common Independent Data Layer (IDL). |
| Smarter Building Showcase Projects | A collection of examples of what smarter buildings are doing today and can do in the future. |
| YP4SB | A community of young professionals passionate to share their experience, enthusiasm, and efforts to achieve ambitious goals through smarter buildings. |
“At C4SB, we believe that great things come about when small groups of passionate people dedicate themselves to changing the status quo. And changing an industry set in its ways for over a hundred years will take a lot of work,” said Rick Justis, co-founder and managing director of C4SB. “So, we invite people of all backgrounds, experience, and roles, whether as owners, operators or occupants, to help define open requirements and standards for smarter buildings that will help make this a better world.”
People passionate about smarter buildings who would like to contribute to, use, or learn more about any of these initiatives can find more information at c4sb.org/smartertogether.
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The Coalition for Smarter Buildings is a community of people passionate about smarter buildings providing a healthier, safer, and more productive environment to live, learn, work, and play. The Coalition is an open group that relies on volunteer contributions to bring down barriers to spreading smarter building solutions to all buildings around the world. C4SB is a not-for-profit 501(c)3 organization, incorporated in Missouri, USA.
#C4SB, #smartertogether, #smartersummit, #smarterbuildings, #smartbuildings, #YP4SB
Contact: Monika Davis, monika@c4sb.org
