Speckle started out as research in digital design collaboration. What become evident was that there was no truly open digital infrastructure for design data sharing that people could actually use, or build on top of without getting locked in proprietary solutions. Therefore, this is what we've set up to build, from the internet up: a truly open, vendor-neutral platform that connects Architecture, Engineering and Construction.
Speckle is open digital infrastructure for collaboratively designing, making and operating the built environment.
It's an ambitious goal. The Speckle Ecosystem is developed in the open by like minded people, on github. We are a welcoming community and do our best to help others join the effort. So far, all the code is released under the MIT License.
Fast Speckle tries very hard to be as fast as your internet connection. You do not upload files: design data - whatever objects you might have - get uploaded only if they were modified.
Responsive & Real Time Furthermore, speckle offers a customizable layer of real-time communications between clients. This is used to propagate events in real time to everyone listening in. Let others now data has been updated, or even automate your whole design process.
Schema agnostic Speckle provides a low level object model and then gets out of the way. You can compose whatever object models you want, and we even support out of the box .NET defined object models.
Extensible and open The Speckle Specs (pun intended) are written in an OpenApi v2 doc. This allows you to profit from all the tooling around this industry standard, from scaffolding a new server implementation to base client generation.
Q: What's the difference with Flux/etc?
A: Flux is dead; Konstru is a proprietary centralized service. Speckle's as open source as they get, meaning no lock-in & no data centralisation and no standards monopoly: you own everything. This was a core design principle from the start that informed everything from how easy it is to deploy your own server to how you can extend speckle's schemas and create new types of clients.
Q: What will stop Speckle from dying off too, just like Flux?
A: Speckle is a community driven effort, built around the open source philosophy by which we believe in creating greater value globally at the expense of quick term gains. In short, you will.
Q: Why are you giving all this away for free?
A: Because software is a zero-cost machine and, to begin with, Speckle was a research project in design communication, enabled by EU public funding. It's not just a technical research problem, it's also a political and social experiment to see whether an open source effort can exist in AEC.
A: This is actually not a frequently asked question. But since you're here, you can join us on slack and check out the git repos and their issues.
Q: Can Speckle do < insert request here > ?
If you want to develop a plugin yourself, the OpenApi v2 specification document is here. We have a .NET SDK as well as examples of frontend plugins that consume the API.
A: Ask on our forum or join the slack channel.