For a job well done, the OSArch steering committee has decided to pay Bruno Postle out the $465.70 USD.
Per his wishes, he is contributing $300 to IFCOpenShell's open collective and the remaining to Yorik Van Havre, for his work with FreeCAD and #NativeIFC.
Also a big thank you to all the funders of this project, as well!
That is, imagine a tool that keeps track of changes to an IFC file over the duration of a design project–a tool that allows branching or forking of different design options from a distributed team, and tool that can asynchronously merge these revisions together.
Bruno Postle has created the seeds of such a tool–an IFC/GIT interface inside BlenderBIM.
Funding for this project will go toward further refinement of the tool, as well as additional functionality such as visual diffing and atomized conflict resolution–as reflected in the following mock up.
Please note, however, this tool will only work on IFC files that were created using a NativeIFC approach. That is, tools that do not rewrite the entire IFC file when exported, but instead only change the portion of the IFC file that was modified at any one commit. Currently only BlenderBIM and FreeCAD provide NativeIFC support. See the NativeIFC white paper for a more nuanced description.
Since this project won the most community votes as a project OSArch should center a funding campaign around, OSArch will use their current funds to match any outside funding, up to $1000.
Not only is this a call for funding this project, it is also a general call for any developers that might be interested to help extend what Bruno has started already. It is our hope that these funds could help bring on additional developers. If you’d like to help, please create an issue on the repo to share your thoughts and proposed intentions.
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General Note about Projects:
Anyone familiar with software development knows that it's sometimes hard to determine when exactly the project is complete. Even when the scope is clearly defined, quite often there's a sense that more can be done to refine the project. This is unavoidable, so in that light, to be fair to both the funders and solution providers, the steering committee will act as the arbiter to determine when the project is done and when the funds should be distributed. When it's 'done' will also be a factor of how much the funding is relative to how involved the scope is. That is say, if a very small amount of funding is provided, for a solution that would require a lot more funding, the steering committee can allocate funds for partial solutions, as well.
Please note, if no one provides a solution to the project with a year (365days), the funds dedicated to this project will be transferred over to OSarch's general funding. The OSArch steering committee will then allocate the funding to other projects.
