The BuiltHub Community

To make BuiltHub relevant for real-life planning needs and ensure a more  sustainable and meaningful data flow for a cost-efficient and rapid building stock decarbonisation, we have been engaging with a Community of Stakeholders. A dedicated BuiltHub stakeholder community was built to gain valuable insights, feedback, and support for existing initiatives. This was done to ensure that the needs and perspectives of all relevant parties are considered and that solutions are more likely to be effective and sustainable in the long-term, increasing buy-in and support for the BSO as well as leading to greater acceptance and adoption of new policies or technologies. The community building was based on three main pillars:

  • Pillar 1 - Invitations to relevant stakeholders to engage with BuiltHub. This action took place at the beginning of the project following initial assessment of stakeholders suggested by project partners.
  • Pillar 2 - Identification of stakeholders’ needs and requirements, as well as their limitations and conditions for participating in a sharing community for building-related data. This action followed the invitations sent to stakeholders and was concluded in the first year of the project.
  • Pillar 3 - Establishing a continuous feedback loop between project progress and its services on one side, and the stakeholders on the other, to ensure that the project satisfies needs and resolves obstacles stakeholders may encounter along the way. These actions started as soon as the first agreements for joining BuiltHub were received and will continue throughout the project.

Over 600 stakeholders were identified and invited. Over 150 of those confirmed are from academia and consultants, local or national authorities, energy agencies, non-profit associations, industry, designers, architects, policy makers, and others. Figure 1 shows that 72% reported that they were active in one or more EU Member States, 14% in countries beyond the EU Member States but in the Horizon 2020 associate countries, and 8% in territories outside the EU, and 6% reported focusing on the entire EU.

The Community’s needs and technical requirements have been collected and assessed through a literature review and direct feedback via surveys and interviews. The result of which fed into the development of the BuiltHub Platform, as well as its data assembly, processing and analysis services and business cases.

Who is using BuiltHub?

BuiltHub Community Stakeholders have been grouped into three categories:

Lead-users

Stakeholders who can directly apply platform results, knowledge and feed in their data for their benefit, such as:

  • Construction and renovation companies
  • Academia and research institutions
  • Public and private utilities and aggregators
  • Facility managers
  • Real estate developers
End-users

Stakeholders who will exploit the platform for their activities and eventually provide data in return, such as:

  • National, regional and local governments, particularly policy-makers and regulators
  • Engineers, architects and professionals related to the building value chain (e.g. independent consultants)
     
Multipliers

Strategic stakeholders  well placed to widely share platform results, such as:

  • Property owners, local and international housing and building associations
  • Local government networks
  • Specialised national, international and EU (energy) agencies
  • NGOs dealing with energy efficiency in buildings

What are Stakeholders' needs?

Stakeholders’ needs and requirements for the BuiltHub platform have been collected and assessed based on a detailed literature review and direct feedback in surveys and interviews. The findings have fed into the development of BuiltHub services related to data assembly, data processing and analysis, IT infrastructure and business cases. Here are some key conclusions we could extract:

  • Needs: 86% of respondents agreed for the need of a user-friendly platform to exchange buildings related data around Europe
  • Engagement: 57% showed interest to joining a community to support building stock transformation using data
  • Use: respondents use buildings and energy data for research and analysis (90%), calculation of scenarios/pathways (59%) and prediction or forecasting (52%)
  • Benefits: benchmarking of data (>53%), complement or cross- referencing with other data (50%) and check/clean/validate data (49%) were found to be very valuable for respondents
  • Services: data collection or storage (76%), analysis/processing (67%) together with data community building, sharing and exchange (67%) were identified as top use cases

Dive into our Stakeholder Community’s needs and technical requirements by reading our synthesis from EU policy, survey, and interviews.  Click below to access our detailed report:

What's next for the Community?

BuiltHub is constantly enlarging its community through its engaging actions and events to support knowledge sharing and transfer, such as surveys, interviews, workshops, webinars, dialogues, 1-on-1 meetings, training, strategic panels, and participation in third party events. Thanks to these actions and events, BuiltHub is in contact with major actors in the field, such as Eurostat, JRC, Google Environmental Insights Explorer, and also collaborates with initiatives such as CA EPBD, CA EED.

In addition, BuiltHub keeps direct contact with several organisations, from the local to the international level, to ensure that the project tackles the very diverse stakeholder requirements and needs. In these exchange and networking events, best practices in knowledge sharing and transfer are constantly discussed. The results from the discussions are used to revise the BuiltHub platform and data-to-knowledge processes, and these inform the BuiltHub roadmap and training.

The projects BEYOND, BIGG, and MATRYCS share many similarities with BuiltHub. They focus on the application of big data technologies and data analytics. However, they differ in the attention given to specific issues and possibly find alternative solutions to a problem. For example, due to the mission of BuiltHub to support the BSO, data collected in BuiltHub has so far been rather aggregated and at national (NUTS 0) to ‘small regions’ (NUTS 3) level but comprehensive of all EU Member States, while BEYOND, BIGG, and MATRYCS go into more detail but concentrate on pilot countries. These complementary top-down and bottom-up approaches are both essential and ultimately need to be combined to achieve their full potential. This is because the top-down approach provides broader coverage while the bottom-up approach provides more detailed and contextualised information. Following both approaches allows cross-validation, i.e., verification of the validity and quality of the data.

Best practices in combining the two approaches are being discussed in BuiltHub’s stakeholder engagement actions and picked up in BuiltHub’s dissemination and communication activities. Consequently, the BuiltHub community overlaps to some extent with the communities of the other projects.

Get involved!

Keen to make the best use of your data, actively support and shape the design of Platform key features? Join our BuiltHub Pioneer User group!

Interested in the project and inspired to help promote responsible data collection? Become a BuiltHub Ambassador!

Learn more herefind us at an upcoming event in person or online.