I am an architect by trade, and one of the main FreeCAD developers (been around since 2008 or so). In FreeCAD, I'm mostly responsible for implementing BIM-related features, but I also touch all other areas and workbenches here and there. BIM stands for Building Information Modeling, and describes a family of tools to model and represent buildings digitally. This goes far further than just plans, a BIM model is a complex and faithful representation of a building, and allows to extract not only plans and sections, but a large quantity of information, such as materials, costs, possible maintenance costs over time, construction planning, etc. With a good BIM model, you can also perform a wide range of simulations, such as calculating efforts in structures, energy consumption, etc. And finally, maybe the most important point, BIM models should be highly shareable and should integrate nicely all the work of the different people working on a building project.

Me and others in the FreeCAD community are working to make FreeCAD a first-class BIM modeling application, that is capable to do the same job (or better, why not!) as commercial BIM software. FreeCAD is free and open-source, runs on Mac, Windows and Linux, and will stay free forever (it cannot be "closed" or "bought"). There is quite a lot done already.

I'm working on FreeCAD when time and money allow, which is highly variable. By sponsoring me here, you are extending the time that I can spend on FreeCAD and therefore fueling the project.

I am still very new at this patreon/sponsoring thing and don't know yet exactly how or what this will allow, but I'm going to write more here in the coming days/weeks, and build a good plan of what I have in mind. But basically, the idea is that this patreon would allow me to spend a certain, fixed number of hours or days per week or month to work exclusively on FreeCAD. I'll do my best to keep this transparent and give a lot of feedback on that point, check the posts below for more on that.

The story of what I'm doing with FreeCAD is registered on my blog and I also regularly post about it on twitter.If you want to keep track of latest improvements in FreeCAD (not only mine), check the new features section of the FreeCAD forum.