OpenHab Marketing is Lacking

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I’m going to keep my reply short because it’s veering off topic. Clearly I failed in that.

If you want to have a discussion on adding something to the marketplace please open a new thread and we can continue there in depth.

But I do want to say the following and answer the non-rhetorical questions (and the one’s I’m going to pretend are not rhetorical).

We’ve done our best to make contributing to the marketplace as easy as possible. If anyone has technically feasible ideas to make it even easier we welcome issues. I like the idea of being able to publish to the forum straight from MainUI, but doubt that would address even half of your complaints.

I don’t understand the question. But the general convention in documentation involving computers, stuff in [ ] or < > denote something that you need to replace with your content. The [ ] or < > are removed. To make this more obvious, the _ and :crayon: are an attempt to make it even more clear these are the parts that you have to replace.

But what never ceases to amaze me is how few people are willing to just experiment. Create a post and see how it looks. See how it works. Adjust and see what changes.

The assumption is that anyone contributing to the marketplace is going to be somewhat even a little bit active on the forum. The number of # is the header level.

Yes.

Not really beyond the obvious stuff like don’t use the same name as someone else’s widget, be polite, etc.

In the description or in the title and the description. You can also add tags to the post. It’s up to you to decide how to document your widget.

However, it should not use hard coded Item names. Item should be parameters so the end users can name their Items how they see fit or use the Items they already have created.

Use what ever makes sense to you. Tags are useful to readers of the forum to help find and identify relevant posts. The only tags that are required is the maturity level which you supply and the “published” tag which a forum moderator will add after review, as described in the template.

You can decide to version it how ever you want. This is all information you are providing to the users of the widget. Whatever you think is best to inform your users what your widget it and how to use it is good.

Given that the very first reply to any post made to this forum where code is posted without code fences is

Please use code fences for all code and logs.

```
Code goes here
```

coupled with the assumption that these users are at least a little bit familiar with the forum, yes, we assume just about everyone would understand that. Note there are also icons at the top of the reply pane to add code fences.

image

Are these users likely to be publishing to the marketplace in the first place? Do we want these sorts of users publishing to the marketplace?

Personally, it never even occurred to me that these users would even want to publish to the marketplace. And I worry if these users do because for the beginners their offering might have quality issues and the user who isn’t engaged with OH that much is likely to abandon their contribution leaving the marketplace littered with broken and forgotten contributions.

There should be at least a little bit of friction to contributing to the marketplace. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be easier but the actual audience for marketplace contributors should be identified.

You don’t have to make yourself “comfortable” with GitHub. The page that opens up when you click the link walks you through all the steps necessary to make the edit and create the PR. @Oliver2 demonstrated above (? maybe it was another thread) even if you don’t know what you are doing, don’t know the difference between a Pull Request and a Press Release, managed to create and submit a PR. In his attempt to show how hard it is he managed to show that even someone who doesn’t know anything about the tools can figure it out.

We also have numerous tutorials here on the forum and have lots of people who will jump at the chance to help if necessary.

What other tools do you need to make updates to the docs? I routinely make small updates to the docs using nothing by a browser and my GitHub account. If you are going to make code changes then yes, you need lots of tools but that’s just software development which always requires lots of tools.

If you don’t even create an issue your problem will most likely never be addressed. You are the one with the problem. You are the one who is best able to provide the detail to solve the problem.

There are many alternative home automation products that are much less complicated. They are much less capable too but that is the trade off. If OH is too complicated to set up and keep up and your home automation needs are modest, perhaps OH isn’t the best choice for your. However, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. You can’t have both the flexibility and capability without the added complexity.

Home automation is hard. That’s just the way it is. We have thousands of little walled gardens, billions of unique use cases (or user stories if Agile is your thing), incompatible licensing, services that start up and close down, etc. The fact that OH does as much as it does, as well as it does, and makes this all as simple as it does is astonishing to me. Could it be even better and simpler? Yes! Absolutely!

But it’s never ever going to be so simple that my spouse will have the patience and willingness to set it up. For that to even become possible, there will have to be a massive consolidation in home automation technologies and APIs and a huge reduction in possibilities down to something about at the level of what Google Home offers as of this writing. Most users of OH though recognize that as the toy that it is though, it’s so limiting, and even that toy is beyond what a lot of users can handle.

I posted this above I think but here it is again: [Wiki] How to contribute to the openHAB Documentation

This is way more detailed and thorough than is necessary but it explains everything. It’s a great resource. When I get lost or forget something (I’m always forgetting how to properly sign off, for example), I always search for this post.

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174

Although deemed off-topic, I’ll try to get this small sidetrack back to the topic. I was curious about Home Assistant’s terminology within this context, and found that they even use the term thing to describe a sensor within their terminology. :wink: So maybe “thing” is not that far off. I’m considering if it would be worth adding a small section about HA vs. OH terminology to our Concepts page to ease the transition for anyone migrating from HA to OH. WDYT? It probably seems a bit optimistic, but I guess it could somehow help when not starting from scratch in the home automation domain, but already having some experience with HA.

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I’m a little uncomfortable with this approach. First of all, HA is not the only other platform someone might migrate to OH from. Do we also include the others? For people who are not coming from HA would this not cause more confusion?

I’d rather see a separate HA to OH tutorial than adding a bunch of mappings between OH’s concepts and other platforms concepts.

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Agreed. Or invest in more materials about the semantic model, an end to end approach for integration a bunch of the most popular devices like Shelly, a bunch of zigbee stuff and such. It’s such a great tool and I feel like it’s not being properly advertised.

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First of all, wow! And I mean this in the most positive way. I pointed out that this mask might not be as selfexplaining as someone with more background might think, and you posted a complete set of answers to all the questions I thought someone could have. Thanks from my side, now you “forced” me to try out. And something I perhaps can give back would be to put this all together in a sort of a tutorial for others who might have all these questions in reality.

But what came out quite clear to me from your last posting is, that there is quite a broad span of people using / working on OH and that there are expectations from both ends of this span to the other end are hard to match. E.G. when you write about the forum software. I do use some other forums on a everyday basis and some are even based on the same software. But there are people like me, just writing plain text. And who feel already quite “educated” when they remember to set a simple “unformated text” fence around something or are able to include a picture or cite another posting where it seems necessary. I never had the need for more, therefore did not search for something more and did not try out something more. And when you look around in the forum the number of posts using more functionality is very limited and is limited to perhaps a handful of users. But now that you told me there is more and what for and how to use it, I hope I remember it when I could need it.

But isn’t that just another example for what I mean with the complex eco system around OH? We came from an expectation to have a GitHub account and be familiar in using it to the forum software. I already named quite some necessary LINUX knowhow, even when using openHABian (which is a great thing!). Then you constantly read about REST-API, YAML, JSON, XML, Framework7, different scripting languages, different JAVA-Versions, different GUIs, UoM, … and all this changes from time to time and you have to start over with the “next big thing”. This all has it’s value for people beeing more on the developer side, but to come back to “marketing”: For someone who want’s to have some “intelligent lightbulbs and an e-mail from the washing machine” as a first start into something more this is not attracting as he/she will not see what what all this “superfluous overhead” has to do with his/her demand. OH cannot be the perfect solution for everybody, I totally agree, but there are people out there with the wish and will to do more, learn more, interact more with a community. And I see nothing wrong in trying to “sell” OH to such people to keep OH alive by discussing what could be done to make things easier, like thinking about what is really necessary to become “part of the family”.

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But that’s a home automation problem. It’s not an OH problem.

Everyone’s home automation requirements are unique. Does everyone need to know all that stuff? No, of course not. But some people will need to know X and others will need to know Y and yet a third set will need to know Z even for a simple case. If you want to use zigbee2mqtt, well you’re going to have to go learn how that service works and how to use MQTT with OH including installing and configuring Mosquitto (or other broker of your choice). But not everyone has that requirement. Others will need to learn how to read Modbus or KNX registers or how to pair a device with a Zigbee coordinator.

There isn’t a whole lot we can do to eliminate all that. The technologies work the way they work. There is only so much we can do about that.

And we can’t predict what each and every user needs to know for their specific requirements, particularly when it comes to the stuff outside of OH.

This is the same reason why How to get started (there is no step-by-step tutorial). There is around 350! combinations of add-ons that are possible with OH. I think that’s more than there are atoms that make up the planet. We’d be at this forever if we made a step-by-step for even a fraction of that. But that then means that the end users must be able to go and learn enough about their requirements and the technologies they need to use outside of OH.

Absolutely we can make things simpler and easier and there’s already been at least one issue created from this thread. But we have to do so in ways that fit in the scope of the actual problem at hand and the number of volunteers we have available.

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I wouldn’t, I agree with Rich where would you stop doing that, iobroker? FHEM? SmartThings ?
It’s not about stealing users from each other. It’s not a saturated market.

It’s about making OH a) widerly known and b) represented right in the media (reviews, YT) in that it isn’t complicated for beginners (any more) so worth trying.

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Also agree… get OH docs updated, fixed, sorted, improved, <insert term here>, before ‘doing’ other systems…

Writing is, in principle difficult for conveying tone and meaning… there is a point to
Jörg Lemmer’s posts… (at least I get most of it and can relate to) — the amount of stuff one has to content with to do OH automation is simply mind-boggling. If one sits down and gets something work, and then does not touch the system for many moths, it means relearning most of it. This happens to me all the time. I spend hours reading to get something done; can’t remember the naming I chose; because as my OH insight grew, my naming got more appropriate (e.g., for splits and concatenations of item names); old posts leading me down the wrong path.
I just encountered a Zigbee problem. Now I have to stick my nose into this to figure why it is not working and more so what to do about it, or how to get around it, or look for alternatives.
For newbies and people who do not dabble in OH on a very regular basis, it is hard to a) keep up, and b) to incorporate new things or functionality. [Maybe it’s me being an old-fart :slight_smile: ]

Anyway, like others said, this is about marketing the whiz-bang new OH4 :slight_smile:

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Just to make sure we are on the same page: These 350! possible combinations of add-ons are one of the big advantages of OH in my eyes and from a marketing perspective it is quite easy to communicate this advantage:

  • You do not have to decide for one producer, wireless protocol, … OH supports them all.
  • And the concept behind OH is so well designed that it is open for everything that may come in the future and can implement it in a consistant manner
  • You just have to make yourself a bit comfortable with this concept and as whatever you connect to OH in the future is treated in an as possible consistent way and can interact with everything already there you get your personal but still standard system that can grow over the time and include things you do not even think about now.

A potential new user with demands like “intelligent lightbulbs and an e-mail from the washing machine” as a start to something bigger reading this will be convinced that OH has a big advantage over using HUE for the lightbulbs an Miele@Home for the washing machine as these would be two individual systems having nothing to do with each other and without a chace to integrate the stereo set, some cameras, door locks, … in the future.

I am speaking about all that pure techical stuff that is so often needed and that I named allready. No potential new user - if he/she is not a software developer by chance - is interested in everything that has nothing to do (at first sight) with the problem/demand he/she wants to solve. But OH has a big focus on such things in communication and users are often demanded to make themself familiar with numerous of these things first, to be able to do quite simple things or become “part of the family”. You are absolutely right, that at a certain point with bigger demands you cannot avoid “going under the hood”, and OH has a big advantage over other solutions that you can go under the hood and find support for going under the hood. But from a marketing perspective it is a desaster if already “newborn users” or even potential users are always bombed with “You have to have/be familiar with this and that”.

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this is marketing :slight_smile:

I have 4 words for you all I … LOVEE … THIS … OPENHAB

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This is now really a Monthy Python „Life of Bryan“ kind conversation (for those of you who are a little bit older) where the members of the people’s front agree they need to stop talking and need to take actions, but they start talking again about urgent actions (and I do not mean this in an evil way).

We are in a kind of chicken/egg situation. In order to break that dilemma, I just can repeat what I mentioned above, we need to establish an institution (comparable to the developers council for the technical strategy) for our external communication (press, marketing, website, video, documentation, etc), make suggestions for feature request, etc. That institution puts together a consistent and a professional marketing plan and also takes decisions so that we simply stop talking and start acting.

I also want to strongly advise that not each individual of us is starting to do a little bit of things here and there, etc. That will create inconsistent messages on the market and will lead to confusion.
Again, once there is a plan, there will be lots of contributors who want to participate in executing the plan.

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And all that technical stuff is caused by the 350 factorial combinations of technologies that OH supports. You can’t have it both ways. Each one of those bindings and combinations of bindings adds a little bit of complexity. They each add something that the end user is going to have to know, research, learn, figure out. And while a lot has been done to make things the same as much as possible (that’s why we have Things in the first place) to minimize as much of the technical complexity as we can, there is always going to be some.

True, but we don’t know what is relevant or not to that new user until we know what the problem they want to solve is. We can’t anticipate what to present so we have to present everything and try to give that user the tools to help them identify what is relevant and what isn’t.

One user may need to learn the ins and outs of connecting OH to Gmail so they can send an email and how to work with the Hue ecosystem. Another may need to learn how to set up Telegram and hook up OH to zigbee2mqtt over MQTT. A third may need to know how to set up the Cloud Connector and connect devices through the Zigbee binding.

Which of these new users do we cater to and which do we leave out in the cold?

Or do we simply say “Sorry, if you want notifications the only option is through the Cloud Connector. If you want email we can’t help because that’s too complicated for new users.”

Often because the new user cannot even understand their own requirements until they have some of this foundation in understanding the technologies they want to use and the problem they want to solve. We can’t do that for them. Or I should say, we could do that for them but only if we limit the options to a manageable set, in which case say goodbye to those 350! combinations of technologies. Maybe we could handle around 20! and we’d end up looking just like Google Home in capability.

Home automation is hard. We are doing our best to make it easier for everyone. But it’s never going to get to the place where new users don’t have to know and understand some basics of the technologies involved.

That’s not how it works. You need to know the basics of the technologies involved just to get OH connected to them in the first place. You can’t even get started. We don’t present these hurdles up front as some sort of test. They are there because we have as of yet found no way to make it any simpler. If you want to connect to email, you have to know how email works. If you want to connect to KNX, you have to know how KNX works. And to understand how all the technologies are normalized in OH you have to know how OH works or, at a minimum, the core concepts.

If anyone can can figure out how to serve new users with a random set of “I want to…” in a way that does not require them to know even just the basics of the technologies involved and the core OH concepts I’ll do more than buy them a beer. We’ve been trying to achieve this for almost a decade.

But I think my beer money is safe. We can, have, and continue to chip around the edges of this problem but IMO it’s not a solvable problem. Maybe someday AI can do something but I’m cautious there.

I should note that there is at least one issue created and being worked based on this thread.

If you mean the Architecture Counsel that is not what it does. The AC adjudicates proposed changes that impact lots of different OH repos (as each repo is separately managed and maintained) and adjudicates conflicts between maintainers who cannot resolve the conflicts among themselves. It does not dictate technical strategy. Even if it did, there is little it could do to enforce it.

Please go and do it! There is nothing stopping you and anyone else on this thread from doing this. Create a topic and start working out how it will work. Start to do some communications and marketing work. Establish a track record. Work with the OH Foundation where appropriate and necessary. Work with the developers where appropriate and necessary.

This is exactly what bottom up means. The collective you decide to do something and go and do it. If you are waiting for someone official to give you permission you’ll be waiting forever. You don’t need anyone’s permission to do this. If you are waiting for someone official to give you direction, no such official exists.

The only restriction is you can’t tell anyone to do anything. We have no employees here. No indentured servants. Only what someone volunteers to do gets done and only to the extent that the volunteer is willing to do.

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No, sorry to be so direct on this. This is exactly what I mean. This is not about a discussion how to solve simple topics/problems. This is about external communication, which should be done in a professional way. And simply starting doing anything may produce some output, but is not a professional approach especially for external communication.

You also misunderstood that I am „waiting for permission or officials“. My post was a call to action. I already volunteered for being part of a team to create a plan and start executing on a plan.

If there are more users who think the same way, great, then we can go ahead.

But, here we go again: Start talking and discussing…

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Not really. It is great that you volunteer for a task force, but why not start a new topic as „call for acton“ to get a „marketing project group“ in place?
That’s what is missing now!

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I can’t say it better than @hmerk but I’ll say it again for emphasis.

If you are tired of all the talking, and are volunteering to do the work, then go get busy! No one here is stopping you and we welcome the effort.

You’ve identified a problem and have at least the start of a plan for how to solve it. Hurray! You’ve even volunteered to contribute to it solving it. Fantastic! All that is missing is actually starting the work.

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Good idea!
I have created a new thread here:
https://community.openhab.org/t/call-to-action-volunteers-for-openhab-marketing/149618
I tried to keep it short but that was very difficult…

Let’s see what the outcome is.

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There might be a way but, unfortunately, I think we don’t have the bargaining power to do it at the moment. I think it’s what companies like Apple do with their smart home ecosystem. They dictate what suppliers should do if they want to get access to their ecosystems and suppliers need to create their products accordingly.
You don’t need to care about bindings, items, etc., to add an accessory to Apple Home.

Instead, we (OH) have to accommodate to what suppliers dictate and develop the bindings according to whatever they offered. This is what brings the intrinsic complexity mentioned by @rlkoshak.

I’m not saying this is bad, I’m just pointing out the reality.

However, I agree OH is not (and will never be) the kind of tool that a user who wants something simple will use. Such a user will definitely opt for Apple, Amazon, or google’s solution where they only have to download an app to their phones and get going.
Who with such expectations, no technical knowledge (or the desire to try and acquire it), and their five senses would even consider setting up a server to run the application in the first place?
I see OH more as a competition (we may not be aggressive competitors but the single fact of existing as a tool makes us competitors) to platforms such as Control4, Savant, etc.

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Sorry, but this “That’s the way it is, and there is nothing we can do about it”, sounds to pessimistic to me. I am no one giving up fast and as I managed to get around with OH since 1.8 already without beeing a developer and beeing too familiar with all the things “recommended” I think I am a quite good example that this is possible. You and others so often helped me, when I got stuck, and yes, there is a learning curve and now I am quite brave to try out things I never expected to be able to do in the past. But there are still hurdles I cannot overcome and I see hurdles I did overcome in the past or constantly overcome, that show room for improvements. Improvements that could lead to a broader user basis (and more active members) by making things more simple.

E.G. when you say that no one can foresee which of the 350! combinations a user might be interested in, and that there cannot be any “How to start”, I must object. I do not know, if there is already statistical material available which addon is used how often, but that could be generated and from that there could be a first handful of common use cases on the small combination of some of the most favorite addons derived worth documenting as “How to start” in a classic 80/20 approach. And in the case that notifications via e-mail are included in such a “How to start” (because this is used most, I do not know if this is true) and someone prefers Signal, so what. He/she will have a first working notification solution available after following this “How to start”. And a hint like “And there are lots of bindings for other notification solutions like Signal, … available” would then lead to a next step. But keep in mind: The system is already fully functioning! And with the aquired knowledge about e-mail notifications from the “How to start” it will be much easier for a new user to understand what is necessary to get notifications also via other services. And with the already working e-mail notifications there is no frustration that “Notifications are too complex in OH, I look for something else” and the user gets every time in the world to succeed with the next step without any “I have to get notifications” feeling.

And this “this is a first viable solution” would also work for other components to include in such a “How to start”, like taking one or two most used standards like Zigbee and z-wave (has to be derived from statistics) with some often used devices, one persistence, concentrate on main UI and maybe add a second GUI like HABpanel or the Android/iOS App, … What exactly to include does not matter but should just be derived from statistics. But the “How to start” should lead to a first little working system that covers some general aspects (e.g. lights, wallsockets, motion detection and doors/windows) and some general knowledge that would allow a new user to buy the next device for the already implemented binding or decide for and implement another binding. And if such a “How to start” leads someone without any clue to buy some z-wave devices first, as they are covered by the “How to start”, instead of going for Zigbee, so what! If he or she later finds out that they would prefer Homematic in the future (as I did), nothing ist lost, thanks to OH, covering “everything”.

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Let’s get back on topic :slight_smile:
If openHAB marketing is lacking, what can you do to promote it.
Lacking = not enough. So we need more of it. Streamers, YouTubers, they go after what gives views.
Are you following openHAB news?
Have you following openHAB on twitter?
If not, do it now: https://x.com/openhab?s=21&t=gXAY9cXXrIJE7SiTBzMD6w

Are you subscribed to openHAB on Reddit?
If not do it now: https://reddit.com/r/openhab/s/pbQj9rE13M

And don’t be another lurker. Interact. Press like. Share the content. Leave a comment saying “thank you, keep up the good work.”

Would you like to see openHAB visible in other platforms? Say which!
Do you share openHAB news about upcoming updates, changes and so on on your public profiles?
If not, start doing it. Don’t know how? Copy what others are doing!

Do you want to support others efforts but don’t know how? Share their content in all of the previously mentioned points and even more!

Are you in a position to use openHAB in a school or work project? Document it, make a presentation, share it everywhere. Did you see others doing the same? Share it everywhere!

I can’t actually believe that I’m sharing my LinkedIn profile here but heck, if it helps why not:
Example 1) Pedro Liberal on LinkedIn: #openhab #esphome #influxdb #arduino #arduinoproject #esp32…

Example 2)

Example 3)

Example 4)

These are normal people, posting their personal projects, and sharing them with others, improving openHAB marketing every day on their own.

Is this not what we are we discussing here really?

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I doubt, there is data available. But I am with you. I think we could easily make a best guess.
What are the top 3 categories (in terms of items linked) and their key players which are integrated in openHAB among our users?
I guess it is

  • Light
    o Zwave, Zigbee, KNX?
    o Shelly
    o Hue
  • Rollershutters
    o Zwave, Zigbee, KNX?
    o Shelly
  • third one?
    o vendor name?

(Probably most of us started with these two categories.)
If we added a few more, I am sure we have covered 80% of a „typical“ setup

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