Hello everyone
I missed this thread.
I’ll read it all slowly again and write another reply.
But in the meantime, please know that I’ll support this as much as I can.
Cheers,
Stuart
I’m not sure if this is “on topic”, but it’s something to think about alongside the whole “Marketing= get more people using our product” subject.
“How do non tech people get what they want without having the skills?”
For example, I’m happy to sell Velbus hardware and find installers, train the installers and get it all working.
But that’s where my skills have to end.
When the customer/ buyer wants a funky interface or linking with other products, I can offer them a ready assembled computer with openHAB installed and I can pull in their Velbus assets, but bright and shiny graphics or rules are just not my skill. (Or at least, not good enough to feel comfortable charging for)
(I’ve just had this conversation with an installer in Dubai)
“Where do we go to openly pay for someone’s time to do the magic?” (Other than handing the whole project over to a Control4 installer to import the Velbus assets and give a glossy tablet to the customer)
Would this make sense to put things like this on a bounty site?
Or should we setup our own version of Guru.com / Freelancer etc etc
There’s money to be made from this, which compensates people for their efforts, which in turn might ease the balance between paid work and volunteer work?
https://www.upwork.com/en-gb/ab/profiles/search/?q=homeassistant
https://www.upwork.com/en-gb/ab/profiles/search/?q=openHAB
https://www.fiverr.com/hired4ucom/create-your-lovelace-interface-for-home-assistant
And so on?
As the old saying goes, “Power is nothing without control”
Purely as an example
(Seems his “top offer” is ~US$250)
Would this / is this appropriate for front end or rules requests?
I don’t know. It’s pretty open and the person creating the bounty gets to define the success criteria.
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To come back to the title of this thread:
“Call to action - volunteers for openHAB “marketing””
Over the last weeks I have published a small series of YouTube videos. Most of them on openHAB topics and -sorry- all in German.
The idea is to show in 2 - 3 minute clips use cases for smart home/ garden/ life and provide project ideas for openHAB.
Target audience are people who already know the basics and just need some inspiration and quick “how to” tips.
At the moment the channel has 7 subscribers and less than 500 views in total - kind of a “best kept secret” 
If anyone has ideas for future videos, just let me know.
The channel is named “automation. information. inspiration.”
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If you could provide a text transcription and authorize me to dub the video (or publish subtitled versions) I would be happy to publish here in Portugal
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I’m happy to create an English dub track if you send me a script.
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Hi Hugo and Stuart,
thanks for the quick response and the offer to produce international versions of the videos!
I would suggest starting with my latest video “010 openHAB Allein zu Haus”:
The reference is of course “Kevin - Home Alone” and it shows how to scare “gangsters” away from your house & garden.
In this way, it is intended to be humorous walk through the possibilities of openHAB and to show a whole range of bindings.
Here you can find the video as mp4 file and a Google docs file with the transcript:
I have no experience with multilingual videos, so I would appreciate any suggestions on how to proceed.
I look forward to working with you!
Kind regards,
Joachim
P.S.
The next two videos in my pipeline are on Ulanzi/Awtrix and “Smarthome Lyrics” using ChatGPT.
Maybe we can continue with that later.
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Hi Joachim
In a studio environment, I’m perfectly happy with multiple audio tracks, but how it’s done in YouTube until a few minutes ago was a mystery.
It turns out, it’s really simple.
People just need to send you an audio track, in sync with your video.
You then upload it as an additional language in YouTube Studio.
I’m not in my office right now, I’ll look at your videos when I get back.
Cheers,
Stuart
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Hi Stuart, even if this is technically possible, how would users (english, portuguese, etc) be encouraged to subscribe a german channel where maybe not all videos will be dubbed ?
I would prefer to open my own channel using Joachim’s videos with portuguese voice only.
To be honest, I have no idea.
It’s not something I’ve given much thought to.
But I do understand both sides of the issue.
I would say…
Do both, it’s no extra effort.
Hi everyone,
Many thanks for the feedback!
Indeed, we could do the following (one of these options or a combination of them):
-
“By hand” localised subtitles (the subtitles that are automatically generated by YT are pretty flawed even in German, so the automatic translation can’t be better)
-
“Multi-language video”: Localised title, description and audio track as multi-language option on my channel (as suggested by Stuart)
-
“Reaction video” of the German version on your channel, where you lower the volume or mute my audio track and translate “on the fly” for your community and share your comments, experiences, anecdotes with your audience
-
Localised version of the video with my video track and your audio track on your respective channel (as suggested by Hugo)
Any of these options are perfectly fine for me.
As Hugo pointed out, a localised version is much more attractive than a German channel with some videos with Portuguese and/or English voice track.
So one of the options 3. or 4. should be considered.
Options 2. and 4. are easy to combine as they do not require any additional effort (as Stuart mentioned).
So a combination of these options makes sense.
Of course, we can also make this decision separately by language:
Option 2. for English and
Options 2. and 4. (or 3.) for Portuguese
In any case:
I am happy to make these videos available as “open source” to help promote openHAB.
If anyone else would like to participate in this group, feel free to join - there are still some languages that could be covered and openHAB topics that could be the subject of a video
Kind regards,
Joachim
P.S.
I’m not sure if it would be appropriate to switch to a private communication channel, to avoid flooding this thread with detailed discussions.
If that’s okay with you, send me an email to
openhab (at) philippi.cc
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I would go for a new thread “OpenHAB YouTube Channels” so that this “marketing” thread continues to be a seed for new ideas.
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Done:
You would loose me as a user of OpenHAB. I see the strength in the perfectly and easy file based configuration. I have used openhab 2 file based, tried with version 3 the ui approach and with openhab 4 I started to do all my configuration file based instead Things and UI widgets.
I also use the many UI pages to control my home from different Tablets and my cellphone. We should keep the file based approch because many other systems don’t even have it. Thats why I’m here since >5 years.
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I believe @Billj is saying to deemphasize the file based examples in the docs and add more UI based examples, not remove file based configs entirely. Removing file based configs is never going to happen so no one needs to get upset about that. But the docs are currently geared towards file based configs to the near exclusion of the UI and that is a problem.
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One reason is that the docs are in textual form and thus it’s much easier to integrate something which is in textual form, too. Of course it’s possible to make a couple of screenshots but it’s much harder to comprehend, understand and GUIs change more often than file syntax.
It’s clear to the maintainers that sharing information through the GUI is hard, so they invented the yaml share logic effectively creating another textual format to share things.
For many users a couple lines of texts are easier to read and understand than a couple of screenshots which seems like a plausible explanation why many examples are in file based config.
Yet this often highly depends on the binding and the examples that were initially provided.
This is not a post that one or the other is better but merely an attempt to explain why there are many textual examples and why people like to give them.
Perhaps but the primary reason is no one has volunteered to go back to the docs which we’ve been carrying since OH 2 to update them. I’ve done some but time is short for me right now and reworking the docs takes a lot of time.
Besides additions for new features, when’t the last time the Things Configuration page was updated in any significant way? The Items Configuration page doesn’t even mention the UI nor does it mention anything about the semantic model. Rules Configuration page at least shows how to create a rule in the UI but it only talks about Rules DSL.
That doesn’t free us from the responsibility to support our less technical users who are the ones most likely to use UI only configs and least likely to be able to understand how to translate from the text config syntax to what they need to do in the UI.
Again, I’m not saying this is an either/or situation. But right now, our docs are not that usable for the folks who primarily use MainUI to configure OH. And that’s what needs to be fixed. It doesn’t matter if the text only docs are easier to write and maintain.
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