Working Groups

As soon as a preparatory group has developed a new scheme for the DGNB System, the head office checks whether the requirements for a new scheme are fulfilled. If so, the profile is passed on to the certification system committee, which determines whether the profile is a new, overriding type of occupancy (main group) or a variation of an existing type of occupancy (subcategory). In the first case, the DGNB Board of Directors has to give its consent. Then, a working group is founded to begin the actual development of the criteria of the new scheme. Each working group generally consists of some 20 interdisciplinary, voluntary DGNB members who have the explicit expert knowledge. Bundling the expertise of architects, planners, researchers, and other representatives of the real estate sector is one of the system‘s great strengths. The experts partly try to see which criteria can be taken over from the core system and where new criteria need to be developed. In this way, they can incrementally formulate a new scheme, which will then be presented to the DGNB certification system committee for adoption.