Welcome to the Square One Wiki. The aim of this site is to serve as a free resource of reference and educational material on the environmental design and performance analysis of buildings.

This is a public area where we are in the process of putting all our online course notes, tutorials and user documentation projects. Making it a wiki (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki) allows people such as yourself to actually add pages and make changes to any part of the documentation. Of course we will be doing the bulk of the work but we do hope this approach will make things much more responsive and significantly speed up ongoing development.

You can still access all of our old building performance information in the Square One archive.

Why a Wiki ?

The contents of this site include software help files, tutorials, teaching packages, on-line course material, technical notes and term definitions. Much of this material is deeply inter-related - sometimes a tutorial will need to refer to a technical note or the help files may need to include term definitions, etc. Bringing all this information together within a wiki creates two important opportunities:

• It allows for free-linking between all forms of content, and
• It allows users to interact directly with the content, making changes to the text, adding new explanations and improving its readbility from a user instead of a developer perspective.

Who Can Help ?

Any registered user can add, edit or update the content on this site. Site registration is completely free, open to anyone and can be done within minutes using the LOGIN area located on the right of this text.

Obviously this level of freedom brings with it a similar level of responsibility, especially when re-writting or deleting someone else's text. It is inevitable that there will be some vandalism and abuse of the system, however we hope that with a small degree of monitoring this can be tolerated in comparison with the potential benefits such a system offers.

Why Should Anyone Help ?

We are not specifically asking for help, however we are a relatively small company and the development of a resource such as this is a huge task. Whilst a small amount of the material here is only relevant to some of our commercial software, the vast majority of background information and course material on building analysis forms a useful and free resource to anyone interested in this area.

If you have some experience and expertise in a particular area and you take the time to add something here, the hope is that this will inspire others just like you with experience and expertise in slightly different areas to do the same. The result is a win-win situation for everyone and a much better set of resources for all building designers.

All changes to the wiki are archived as page revisions, allowing users to see your contributions and comment on changes, etc.