How I Built a BIM Community with Machiel Basson

On the third Thursday of every month, Machiel Basson sits at a table in a Sydney bar with an orange balloon tied to it. Strangers walk past and wish him a happy birthday. Some nights twenty people join him. One cold, wet night in the school holidays, one person came.

He stayed anyway. The balloon is how people find him, and someone should always be there to be found.

In a profession too young to have its own institutions, the network people build for themselves is how the industry learns.

Everything Came Through People

Machiel talked his way into the first BIM subject at his university. That led to his capstone, his internship and his first job, each through a conversation.

He joined the industry just after COVID, when nothing was running. The few events that survived met once a year, too rarely to really know anyone.

At drinks after one, people recalled a monthly group from years earlier. Machiel, who had already spent six years running a youth group, asked the obvious question: why not start one again? He called his reason necessity.

The first thing he learned was what had happened to the groups that came before.

A Group That Needs Nothing

An older Sydney event had stalled because it lost its sponsor. Hiring a venue is expensive, and when the money stopped, the meetings stopped.

So Machiel built BIM Brews to need nothing at all. It meets in a bar. Everyone buys their own drink. There is no stage, no banners and no catering, just a couple of streamers that make it look like a birthday.

Those limits also kept the door open. Many industry events are invite only, and a graduate fresh out of university rarely gets the invitation. A gathering that costs nothing to run can welcome anyone, every month.

What People Share When There Is No Agenda

Most industry events follow a schedule, often built to earn professional development hours, with fifteen minutes of networking at the end. Engineers need 50 hours a year.

BIM professionals have no such requirement, which sounds lucky but has a cost. Nobody formally collects what BIM people learn, so they share it with each other.

At BIM Brews, with no agenda and no free food, the people who come are there to teach or to learn. Machiel’s favourite example is a man who arrived with a printout of his screen and asked the table which buttons to press. People leaned over the page and walked him through it. Then they bought each other drinks.

In my experience, this is the knowledge that matters most and travels least. It lives in people’s heads, and it only comes out when someone feels safe enough to ask.

People can only share once they have found each other.

The Hard Part Is Showing Up

The first venue held around 400 people. How do you find a stranger you have only seen in a LinkedIn photo? Machiel had seen a video of a balloon tied to a backpack, making one person easy to follow through a crowd. He chose orange because it sits opposite blue on the colour wheel, and blue belonged to his employer at the time.

LinkedIn made the group look credible, but a monthly event cannot feed a platform that wants a post every few days. A simple email list worked far better.

Keeping people coming back comes down to hosting. Machiel meets every newcomer, asks what brought them, and introduces them to someone who can help. Three or four people have found jobs this way.

His advice to anyone starting something similar: decide what sits at the core, and protect it. For BIM Brews that is connection. A bar will not suit everyone, and other events can serve other needs.

Which leaves the bigger question: why do BIM people need this so badly?

Half In, Half Out

On one major project, Machiel’s team sat upstairs. He, the BIM person, was placed downstairs by reception. He was on the team, and yet he sat apart from it.

Sometimes BIM sits halfway between tech support and the project team, and fits neatly into neither. The work keeps people at their screens. And the discipline is too young to have civil engineering’s centuries of institutions.

So the same problems repeat everywhere. Machiel thinks that only when you meet your peers you learn the whole industry is fighting the same battle.

The good ideas travel too, carried by people moving between projects. When Machiel moved from IIMBE to ICON, teams he had competed with two weeks earlier became the people he needed. He puts it simply: competitors by day, friends by night.

Which brings us back to the orange balloon. It is a promise that someone will be there, even on the cold nights. Machiel’s advice to anyone who feels disconnected is blunt: you probably are, and it is worth fixing. Go to an event. Message one person and ask for a coffee. He says this as an introvert himself. As AI changes BIM work, the people who keep learning from each other will be best prepared.