The Association of German Engineers (VDI) is adopting a new approach: Since the start of November, a pilot project has been underway in the VDI’s Building and Building Services division , a project in which all interested experts are to work together to revise a guideline through crowdworking. The guideline in question is VDI 2075 , the comprehensive and multidiscipline set of rules governing building services for facilities with artificial ice surfaces. Experts can register at www.vdi.de/2075 in November to take part in the collaborative online editing of the existing guideline text. The platform enables those collaborating on the project to work directly in the guideline text in an interactive, networked manner.

The around four-week crowdworking phase will be followed by the relevant work by the committee pursuant to VDI 1000 , required for the finished product to be deemed as a generally accepted technical rule. According to the VDI, in this pilot project, the crowdworking phase above all serves to also motivate groups to work on guidelines that usually shy away from traditional committee work with its associated long meetings.