12th RTC Australasia 2016

Title RTC Conference Australasia
Subject By Users – For Users
Date | Host 12th May – 14th May 2016 | RTC Events Management
Venue The Crowne Plaza | Hunter Valley | Australia

The Twelfth RTC Australasia: A wrap up and why it is not being called the “Revit Technology Conference” anymore.

This year, the RTC Australasia was held at the Crowne Plaza in one of Australia’s most sophisticated food and wine regions: the Hunter Valley. About 150km north of Sydney – nearly 400 people attended this year’s RTC Australasia, making it a great conference once again.

Welcome and opening statements: Opening the conference, Chris Needham started the Keynote Address event with an opening remark, announcing that the “RTC is no longer the Revit Technology Conference – not confined by name or nature to all things Revit. It is no longer constrained to design, either”. He outlined that the goal of the RTC event management would be to build an attendee base of a much broader demographic.

The Freak Factor: This year’s keynote speaker was David Randoll who presented “The Freak Factor: Discovering Uniqueness by Flaunting Weakness”. As someone who professed to talk for a living, he spoke about how people can get the most out of themselves by allowing them to do what they are best at instead of trying to fix their flaws. In fact their flaws can be important clues to their strengths.

Conference Sessions: Afterwards, the conference continued with individual sessions, including presentations and lab sessions as well as two new streams for construction planning and estimating and the ArchiCAD user community which joined via ARCHICON. As usual the lab sessions offered gallery and class seating and – apart from some technical challenges during some sessions – were very well prepared and presented.

Exhibition: The exhibition took place in the exhibition centre, presenting Sefaira, Autodesk, Codebook, USG Boral, Solibri, Invicara, the RTC gadgets lab, CAD Learning (who also sponsored the competition prizes), Pluralsight, A2K Technologies, SysQue, Newforma, Peer Software, Ideate, Revitzo, CAD Group, CR Kennedy, dRofus, Oasys and Chaos Group as well as Common Elements Ltd.

Social Events: As always, the social events were one of the highlights during the RTC event. At the end of the first day of the conference, the Welcome Function took place in the exhibition hall (sponsored by Ideate), being followed by the Friday Evening Function which took place at the Hope Estate Winery (sponsored by Chaos Group). The last day was highlighted by the Saturday’s Gala Dinner (sponsored by Newforma) in which Chris Needham announced that the RTC Australasia 2017 will be held at the Adelaide Convention Centre, from the 25th to the 27th of May, 2017.

Overall the twelfth RTC Australasia 2016 has shown that the AEC industry is not just discussing BIM as a new technology anymore, instead BIM has become an integral part of business strategies and conversations. As Dr. Dominik Holzer mentioned in his session, BIM technology may not always be mandatory yet but there is an increasing number of organisations and states that are already asking for it, changing the AEC industry and the role of those managing it.

Source Blog of Autodesk User Group International | Online-Publication | www.blaugi.com | Status: H. de Groot, 24th May 2016