I am new to this website. If a website wanted to be very beneficial and meet the needs of it's members, it would provide sample LEED submittal documents for all the LEED prerequisites and credits. First time LEED AP's could find one they like and model after it. Other LEED AP's could use it to get a sampling of how other Certified Green Buildings obtained their credits and the methods they used to achieve them. I question the motive of USGBC when they will not provide such basic and necessary information. Harvard University is the only one I can find on the website to open their LEED submittal documentation to the public. I think Harvard will be a leader in the industy, because of their actions. I am surprised that other government organizations, who promote openness, have not opened there LEED submittal documentation to the public. Please respond, I would like to hear your comments. Thank you.
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Tristan Roberts
RepresentativeVermont House of Representatives
LEEDuser Expert
11474 thumbs up
April 3, 2010 - 2:44 pm
Hi BIll, your idea about what a LEED help website like this should be is, I think, very close to what our site offers. I'll come back to that in a second, first a couple of key points.1) LEEDuser (this site) is a membership-based resource at which we aim to be very responsive to the needs of members (like yourself). You want more sample LEED Online forms? We're working to provide as many as we can.2) USGBC is the sole authority on LEED and GBCI is the sole authority on LEED certification. Blank LEED Online forms are their intellectual property and they appear hear only with USGBC's permission. USGBC and GBCI have so far not chosen to provide sample copies of all the LEED v2009 forms that exist. You can only access them via LEED Online, as a registered project. I know from our contacts there that the idea of providing more samples is under consideration, and I've encouraged this based on feedback like yours.3) I would agree that I'm surprised more organizations have not divulged their LEED documentation. One other besides Harvard that I know of is StopWaste.org. A couple limitations of the Harvard site are that all of its projects are from older versions of LEED, and the requirements and templates have changed. Secondly, their documentation examples are only useful for an example for the particular approach that they took, and for just the credits they pursued. So the usefulness is a bit limited.If you review the "Documentation Toolkits" that are available for most of the LEED credits shown on this site (see the credit listings for lists of all credits, then click through to the credit and view the Documentation Toolkit tab), you'll see that we have provided both actual examples of many credits, selected for relevance to LEED v2009 systems, and also templates that are explicitly designed for the average project—with instructions on how to customize them for your project.Please let me know if this is useful for you and if there is more we can do to help you and your LEED projects.