BILT ANZ 2021 – TOP 10!

As always, one of our most popular posts is our post event Top 10.  However, this time round, it was really really hard for us to rank our speakers – everyone was THAT GOOD!  Seriously, our speaker rankings have never been higher, and we thank all of the speakers who participated for their amazing work and in many cases patience over the last 3 years planning the Sydney event.  Obviously it paid off in the quality of your presentations.  With the rankings overall being so close, this year rather than rank by Top 10, we have decided to award across a number of categories instead. 

Don’t forget abstracts close this Sunday 8 May at 11.59pm for the Gold Coast event in November.  Click here to submit your abstract now.  You gotta be in it to win it! 

Most Fun 

BIMgo was back again, this session has become a popular regular event in itself.  Not only a chance to win prizes but “lots of fun as well as interesting panel discussion”.  Thanks to Chris “Razzell Dazzle” and the team at dRofus for this entertaining and light-hearted session to finish off the event. 

Best New Speakers 

Best New Speaker was a tie between Melanie Binks and Gavin Crump.  Congratulations to you both and we hope to see you back at BILT to speak again! 

Melanie Binks ran a workshop The information Age of Construction – Data and Its Evolutionary Journey which got a great response from attendees.  As well as running her own session, she also agreed at very late notice to join the informative panel Heading down the ISO19650 path, the good, the bad and the ugly! 

Gavin presented 2 sessions Revit templating like a BIM Guru and Tired of Dynamo? Give PyRevit a go!  Unlike most of our speakers, Gavin wasn’t making a return to live presenting – but this was his first time presenting to a live audience rather than into the ether of You Tube!  Both sessions were very popular and what more can we say about Gavin’s sessions than “Gurulicious!!!” 

Best Remote Session 

This year for the first time, we ran a whole stream of remote sessions to allow speakers who couldn’t attend in person due to COVID travel restrictions to participate and contribute to the event.  Joe Banks has regularly featured as a top speaker, and this year ranked highly as the top remote session with his session Enscape and Twinmotion, getting the best out of your real-time rendering.  “Great session as always.” 

Best Panel 

Jenny Tseng and Ceilidh Higgins ran a special panel session Harness the Power of Diversity to Drive Change, which was one of our high scoring sessions as well as attracting a lot of social media mentions.  Feedback received included “One of the best sessions in BILT history. A diversified discussion with each panellist providing different perspective with its own depth. The increased consciousness is encouraging.” 

Top Ranked 

While it was tough to choose, we did still have two sessions that stood out from the crowd.  Paul Wintour and Brett Burling are joint winners of our Number 1 Speaker ranking this year. 

Paul Wintour’s Rhino. Inside: Connecting Grasshopper to Revit has convinced a lot of people to explore this tool “Awesome, good level of info for newbies. Will be testing and probably purchasing based on this session” and “Great presentation and content especially for beginners and the QnA had great depth.” 

Brett Burling’s session Quickly analyse your Revit models with the Revit API to drive in-model dashboards was equally popular with great takeaways.  “Great presso. Love the model checker fix functionality” and “Great presentation. Thanks for showcasing and explaining these widgets and for providing the native code. Will visit your GitHub in a regular basis :)” 

Special Mentions 

Finally we would like to give special mentions to the following speakers.  Simon Byng, Farzam Farzadi, Deepak Maini, Joshua Lumley, Evan Quick, Mark Cronin, Simon Vaux and Roy Qian + Andrew Eaton – who all got some fantastic speaker feedback.