Linking up the FIDIC contracts community

With more and more organisations signing up to use FIDIC contracts and increasing interest in their use, the online community of users around these standard forms is growing.

FIDIC is rightly renowned for its international standard forms of contract for use on national and international construction projects. As well as publishing standard contracts for works and agreements for clients, consultants, sub-consultants, joint ventures and representatives. FIDIC also publishes various business practice documents such as policy papers, guidelines and training manuals.

These documents cover a range of issues including risk management, project sustainability management, environment, integrity management, dispute resolution techniques and insurance and a number of guides for quality-based selection, procurement and tendering procedures. With an increasing number of organisations choosing to use FIDIC contracts, the thirst for information and knowledge about these industry-leading documents has never been higher.

That interest is underlined by the massive turnouts at FIDIC webinars on contractual issues (see page 5) and the number of questions about contracts that are raised by attendees at FIDIC events, even when they are not specifically dealing with the issue of contracts. There is now a growing community of FIDIC contract users and a desire to come together to discuss key issues of interest and share best practice and to provide an online space for all FIDIC contract users to gather to engage as a community, FIDIC has recently set up an Official FIDIC Contract Users’ Group on LinkedIn.

“We want this LinkedIn group to be the leading online community for FIDIC contract users,” said Nadia Van Der Waltova, digital marketing and communications executive. “Members of the group will be the first to hear of the latest FIDIC contract users’ news, events, training and offers and they can compare experiences with other contract users on the most common challenges facing the industry. We also see the group as providing a forum to brainstorm for creativity and innovation in the future development of FIDIC contracts,” Van Der Waltova said.

LinkedIn is already a fruitful platform for raising awareness about FIDIC and its contracts. The recent record-breaking attendance for the FIDIC webinar, FIDIC contracts - the gold standard for projects, was boosted by the massive numbers of people who registered for the event via a FIDIC LinkedIn events page. The LinkedIn event was shared multiple times and over 7,000 professionals marked their interest in attending from a multitude of different industries, job functions and companies. Within days of the Official FIDIC Contract Users’ Group being set up on LinkedIn, hundreds of people joined it and the numbers are rising every day.

“It’s really great to see this level of interest in FIDIC,” said Van Der Waltova, who said that FIDIC was aiming to increase affinity, awareness and engagement to help build a vibrant community of contract users. “Expanding the number of positive engagements with people that know, like, and further refer to FIDIC contracts within their networks is a key aim of our Official FIDIC Contract Users’ Group. In this way we can have useful conversations with industry professionals and help to reinforce FIDIC’s thought leadership in the infrastructure and construction industry,” she said.