I was just wondering, do we have any insight in how many active installations there are running at any given time?
Is there any information on number of downloads, users, active cloud usage etc? Would be interesting to track this, and detect trends over time… is openHAB really trending towards world domination or not? 
Hi
In Misterhouse, they have a world map with pins showing install locations. This gave a great visual tool of the quantity of users and also great feedback to people that are new to home automation but think OH will not work in their country ie Australia.
The pins were manually added by the users.
It would be nice to see a map where users indicate their installations. Do you know which platform they used in Misterhouse?
https://community.openhab.org/t/openhabian-hassle-free-rpi-image/13379/670
Great news! How does this compare to the downloads/clones of the other packages like on Synology, manual installations etc.?
Could we also see information on user statistics of the cloud service, demo house, forum usage?
If we can show positive trends on usage, downloads etc., we might be able to use that information to attract more corporate sponsors to support the foundation commercially or in kind, or convince other platforms/hardware manufacturers to support binding development etc.
I think there is some real value in this, I think more manufactures would be willing to open their standards if they saw openHAB as a viable market.
You could probably put some google analytics on the server and forums here to track number of users and IP locations.
Google Analytics is already active on all openhab websites. I can provide only rough information, because it can be very blocked very easily (an adblocker is sufficient).
That would be great indeed! Some statistics (like the downloads of openHABian) are already available, while others would need to be collected. The meaning of these values is arguable…
The holy grail of that idea would be usage statistics directly from the openHAB installation, including setup size, used add-ons, etc. This is however a complicated topic as nobody wants to be tracked and monitored and there are (probably) legal issues we would have to take care of. Funnily enough, that could be done by yet another add-on 
I love the map idea. Presentation of such a map is actually not too complicated, a way to add (and remove) users from that map needs to be done right. I’m again looking at the add-on idea above.
Another great feature derived from usage statistics would be a bindings sorting by install count and popularity.
I remember that the Eclipse Foundation tried to collect usage statistics with an opt-out option in Eclipse two or three releases ago. As far as I remember they introduced it in a milestone build and had to remove it with the next milestone because of the large number of complaints.
An opt-in solution or via an add-on would be acceptable. Or something like an optional registration (with only the country mandatory) on the openHAB startpage.
Hi,
I went to the MH website and I cannot see this map page anymore. (I was a MH user and placed my pin on this map).
After a bit of searching, I did find this site for making such maps and quickly created a Pin showing user details and general config. I would be happy to share this style of information. https://mapjam.com
Some great ideas here! There are probably three different areas:
1) Social engagement:
2) ‘Hard’ data
3) Map
Voluntary map that users can use to indicate where their installation is based (more for the fun)
The first six measurements we can keep in a simple shared Google Spreadsheet. I suggest not to over complicate it. I’m guessing the absolute numbers might not even matter that much, but the trend over the months will tell (I’m expecting) a compelling story which we can use when presenting to potential new users (make fairs etc), manufacturers to get support for opening up software etc. etc.
An idea on detecting which bindings are most popular: Is that data available in mycloud data, and could we anonymize that for analysis?
Not necessarily. Why not show usage statistics for the myopenHAB service? This gives only a rough estimate, but could/would be an explicit opt in through the account page. Additionally people would be able to optionally add a location (lat/lon) that could be placed on a map.
And since openHAB is open source, I would prefer showing it over an OpenStreetMap layer. 
“Another” vs “an existing” add-on, whatever helps 
Yes myopenhab would probably be a good place for this functionality. What does @MARZIMA think?
hi I really like your ideas and discussion.
myopenhab.org already has some kind of feature built inside. To see amount of registered users and instances.
BUT: We must be really careful with this topic and Security & Privacy are really important.
It is always a tradeoff. We keep the privacy really serious and we can see only generic data, like amount of registered users, but we don’t know or collect the location etc. If we bring such features, this must be optionally and by action of the users.
Keep in mind: This would also affect our myopenhab.org privacy policy, so we need to rethink this clearly.
Don’t want to stop your creativity, but we need to be really protective with this topic.
BR Mehmet
That’s exactly why in the above I suggested an explicit opt-in for being included in the stats and adding your location to a map.
This is a nice community. For me it doesn’t matter if we are 200 or 2.000.000 people. And you will never get an accurate value. Not everyone uses myopenhab. Not everyone uses the forum or is willing to subscribe to it. I’m completely offline with my OH setup and have AdBlock enabled. OK, I got an account for this great forum. This would count!
Sorry for replying on a very old topic, just saw it now
Being one of the users that don’t use myopenHAB I’m wondering if that’s really would give relevant statistics? An add-on for collecting and sending statistics would probably be better. I agree with the opinions above though, if it’s opt-out we will probably get complaints from paranoid users and if it’s opt-in just a tiny part of all users will ever install it.
For my own part I have no problem with sharing anonymous information such as OS, installed version, installation method, used bindings and maybe number of Items/Things if it’d help the community. Can’t really see the problem with that…
