Humanity are builders. Satellite photos of Earth are covered with lights emanating from our giant cities teeming with skyscrapers that scratch the sky. From mud huts to moon bases, for millennia we have erected monuments for living, leisure and legacy. Every day, new construction projects start, involving thousands of contractors and service providers needing to synergize and construct buildings that will likely remain long after those who built them have passed on. Our buildings are the pillars of the earth, and our civilizations are measured by our expertise in building them.

Fragmentation and Data Silos in Construction

Construction is a deeply fragmented industry. Even a residential house build is likely to involve tens or even hundreds of separate stakeholders and contractors trying to work together to achieve a goal. When it comes to a large office building, that number can run into the thousands. London’s Crossrail involved 700 contractors over 10 years, all firms employing many many people. It is also by its nature a highly specialized industry - one firm handles the plumbing, another the electrics, another the legalese, and so on. Projects often require teamwork and synergy between actors with radically different standardization practices and potentially diverse data strategies and inherent data silos. There can either be a lack of willingness to share data over competition fears, or a complete inability too due to incompatible architecture. 

Either way, it’s a problem. Collaboration is what construction is all about, and you can’t collaborate effectively without integrating with another’s workflows. Even when using digital tools like BIM (Building Information Modelling), interoperability issues between vendors, versions and the software tools contractors use remain endemic. In a paper-reliant, digital-averse trust-based industry like construction, this is incredibly slow and cumbersome. There is a reason construction projects almost always overrun their schedule. Every onsite activity needs to be compliant, pre-agreed, and layered with another party’s work. If you lay down flooring before the underfloor heating was installed because your outsourced contractor for the day wasn’t provisioned with the right information - that’s a costly mistake. 

It’s a mistake that happens every single day on construction sites around the world. A McKinsey study found poor communication and document management contributes to 30% of total project overruns globally. Every party has their own CAD files, permit PDFs, versioned blueprints, and compliance docs. They may also have different accounts of what has been performed, when it was done, and whether it was permitted. This is before you even factor in that plans change on the fly, and updating everyone on the changes adds another layer of complexity to an already fraught process. Propagation of changes across a construction site is not clean, and there are often plenty of conflicts to resolve. From architect to structural engineer to fabricator to workmen, data has to pass through so many hands working with so many different systems that it’s a miracle we ever get anything built at all - or that we don’t make more mistakes.

Extreme Compliance Demands

One reason we ultimately don’t make too many mistakes in construction is the extreme compliance demands. Nowhere is activity more rigorously logged than on site, as firms are subject - or should be subject - to the strictest accounting demands of their work to ensure what they build stands the test of time, or a strong wind. As such, there is a huge amount of sensitive data produced on a construction site that is subject not only to general privacy and commercial concerns, but strict regulatory oversight over its handling. Drone surveys, on-site camera footage, sensor logs, inspection forms, work credentials - and that’s before we get onto any particularly sensitive data around the building site itself, say it’s commercial or military applications. Firms have to be careful not to share this sensitive data with some of their partners, whilst simultaneously also providing them with the data they do need to advance the project. 

Construction is the perfect example of a deeply fragmented industry with outmoded practices that is ripe for change. It’s exactly the type of industry where decentralized data management practices could thrive to the benefit of everyone involved. An immutable, tamper-free, privacy-enshrined and fully interoperable data management substrate for construction projects would mean many more being finished on-time and on-budget. 

The Key to Data Collaboration in Complex Systems

Source Network’s stack can help construction companies provide proof-based compliance through SourceHub, portable credentials for workers and inspectors, and automated project milestone auditing. Onsite data collected by sensors and processed by DefraDB could be synced to the main project database seamlessly (even if stakeholders rely on centralized infra). LensVM could be used to create bidirectional schema between different workflow platforms so everyone is singing off the same song sheet and these Towers of Babel get built. As it was then, so it is now: the languages need to be the same. These transformations, syncs, and data shares between agents would all be auto-audited, too, so worksites can remain compliant by default, with edge-native and local deployment capabilities. 

Worksites must also remain private by default. In an industry plagued by reluctant data sharing, and reasonably so, use of fine-grained access control policies for data is a must. The plumbing firm only needs access to the blueprints that install pipes. They don’t need to know about concrete for the helipad on the roof. 

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Privacy by default leads to more effective data sharing, not less effective. Scoped versioning of data and effectively portioning while remaining conflict free is how vastly complex systems like construction projects can work efficiently, fast, and within their regulatory guardrails.

New Foundations

The future of construction is collaborative, distributed and precise. Those three words also sum up Source Network’s approach to the future of everything. Construction is but an example of a broader mission. We, as a society, have built our online systems on yesterday’s foundations, and our towers are beginning to fall as a result. The cloud infrastructure, permissioned architectures, data hoarding practices and privacy breaches have led to bloated inefficient systems in every sector we use computers, including the construction industry. 

As any architect will tell you, you can’t build high without building wide. Source Network is about ripping up foundations and laying down new ones. A new wiring for an OpenWeb that will power up industries by letting any ecosystem - from construction site to satellite array - sync, process, query and manage the data it produces without ever yielding sovereignty over their endeavor.