This is mostly just a “wow, wouldn’t it be cool if…” that I thought of.
Tl;dr It would be really cool if there was a way for the HA developer community to ask “questions” of the HA active installs and let people easily “donate” their information to help inform development direction and architecture discussions being had.
Basically what I’m imagining is a repo where integration developers or Nabu Casa employees can create targeted, public queries that they want to ask the community about their installations, and then allow users a panel in the Analytics settings to “donate” their information to inform developers of extensions or add-ons they use that they’re comfortable sharing.
Today the only analytics are represented on analytics.home-assistant.io, with things like device counts, version, install type, hardware, location, installed integrations, etc, but often integration and addon developers could really use some insights from their community in a more structured way than GitHub discussions and community/discord posts, as well as more targeted information about how popular certain features are or aren’t, or even just direct user polling about a development direction in the form of a poll.
It would be a really cool place to add community feedback from users that aren’t as tech savvy or aren’t active in the forums.
For privacy protection it would definitely need to be a centralized, PR-reviewed system that reviews confirm that the query being asked is reflective of the description in the data request. Also managing something like that centrally would make it much easier to ensure that the data is being collected without other identifying information.
You wouldn’t probably do notifications other than maybe a bubble on/next to the analytics settings menu of available queries, and you could filter it down to only installed add-ons or integrations, as well as global questions about HA usage at large.
Anyway, curious anyone else’s thoughts, thought it would be a neat way to gather feedback, and analytics from users while still providing user choice and anonymity.
Some random examples I thought of that could inform architecture decisions:
- DB size, retention period
- Query latency metrics
- feature adoption (like adoption of the new sections dashboards)
- specific addon/integration config option usage (how popular is X configuration method)
- Feature voting: “Would you as a user of X like Y divisive implementation choice?” with y/n vote option
There’s any number of really useful ways a system like that could be used to accept donated user data and it seems like a really cool way to get engagement from users that either don’t actively watch the forums, or aren’t technically inclined and monitoring GitHub issues and discussions.