In early October, Nexus Labs, a very popular source of podcasts, whitepapers and technical articles aimed at smart buildings enthusiasts, ventured into new territory and brought their growing community together for a first of its kind event. We have been reflecting since the inaugural event, two things made this event different. First, it was focused primarily on its loyal community of industry experts. The community is what created the event, not the other way around. Second, the well known “complaints” about typical industry events were critical inputs that influenced the planning and format of NexusCon. 

FPC Global has engaged with Nexus Labs and their marketplace over the past 12 months. It was great to increase our participation by attending this event in person and participating in a variety of sessions. FPC presented information about the business framework we feel is required to scale digital building technologies across your portfolio. We provided a session that highlighted the pitfalls of the current design-build process and how to avoid them in future projects. FPC also had the privilege of moderating the first ever discussion between vendors and buyers to share what we all can do to help move the industry forward and to stop derailing progress. To wrap up NexusCon, James Dice asked the audience 4 questions, and it is these that we wanted to reflect on in this article.

1. What was a key learning from the event?
2. What is a key takeaway that we had from the event?
3. Someone you’ll stay in touch with?
4. Something you’ll do to push the industry forward?

FPC’s Brian Vaughn attended the event along with our James Atkins and Curtis Hilger. Brian’s response to the first question was “We can have real conversations without hyperbole and NO ONE died.” Often with panels, people over hype things or speak to ideal states and rarely speak to reality and never to failures. NexusCon showed that putting the right guidelines together can help foster more real conversations where we all can learn. Another key learning is there is still a long way to go in terms of bridging the client and vendor divide and the way to start reducing that divide is to work together, collaboratively as one. The challenge we all have ahead of us is big enough with opportunities aplenty for all. We’re not as far away as we may make each other think. Let’s remember why we’re doing this, it’s all for great and really important reasons!

A key takeaway for FPC is that more and more organizations are establishing programs to manage digital building technologies. It was comforting to see the growing number of case studies, use cases and pitfalls these programs have encountered that are similar to our experiences. Several companies presented on what they have been able to accomplish along their path toward digital transformation.  Sessions were routinely bolstered by open questions and conversation by others who have just started this journey. 

For the past 10 years, FPC has helped develop Smart Building Frameworks and are ready to help accelerate the time organizations need to effect transformation within their own portfolios. Furthermore, even though organizations are taking their own paths, there are similarities.

We liked the idea of writing down someone we hoped to keep in touch with. For Brian, he met an old University classmate that is part of the industry and hasn’t seen for over a decade. We are looking forward to staying in touch with him and getting engaged more across the Nexus community. We also met a number of industry professionals that were relatively new to the digital building marketplace who came to learn how their organizations might benefit from the variety of solutions presented as part of the vendor showcase.   

One of the ways to move the industry forward – as demonstrated by the event’s community oriented approach – is to take the risk of pushing the conversations to focus on stakeholder needs and to find new people to engage into the community to foster growth and a breadth of perspectives. The experiment of the first NexusCon went well. We hope to take this learning and encourage more people to attend future events. The key is that opening the conversations to more real information and shared learning will help de-risk the adoption of technology across the industry. In addition, we plan on bringing the sentiments from NexusCon to our colleagues and partners in the European market and hope to see a NexusCon conference in Europe in the near future.

We are looking forward to continued engagement in Nexus Labs events throughout the year virtually and connecting with others within the community. Very well done to James, Rosy and the Nexus team, we are excited by this movement to take forward and move the dial. Come join us at https://www.nexuslabs.online/