Introduction: Inês, your new Community Associate! ✨

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Hey, everyone! I’m Inês (she/her) and I’m the new Community Associate at the Open Home Foundation! I started this job just last week, and wanted to properly introduce myself. :smiling_face:

I’ve got a background in political science, but somewhere along the way I fell in love with communications work and never looked back. I spent the last three years at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) working on community storytelling and digital engagement, and before that I managed social media at Maternova, a health-tech start-up. Both those jobs were mostly remote, so I got to travel all over the place. My hack? Petsitting for housing! I got started on TrustedHousesitters (highly recommend, lmk if you need a referral code ahah) and get to spend weeks at a time getting to know new cities while also spending time with cute dogs and cats - it’s the best! :dog_face:

Now at the Foundation, I’m here to support Missy with making sure our platforms are the best they can be, understanding the constraints that come with each of them. I’ll also be heavily involved with Community Day, which I can’t wait for! But one of my main focuses is to bring some more storytelling capacity to the Foundation. We all know the incredible work you do supporting one another and coming up with innovative projects, but we’d also like the world to know about it! So, I’ll be looking for stories and projects to spotlight, always with your consent and input. :sparkles:

My Open Home journey has been a fun one. I’m what’s been called a “Home Assistant victim” - my partner got me into it when we first moved in together. But getting to know the Foundation and the community around it over the past year has been nothing short of incredible. To be perfectly honest, I’m not a developer or engineer, but watching you all troubleshoot and share what you’ve built has taught me a lot and it’s a big part of why I’m so excited to be here and help tell those stories! :speech_balloon:

Outside of work, I’m based in Lisbon, Portugal (where I’m from), though I’ve also lived in Italy, the UAE, and Switzerland. I live with my partner and our sweet dog Sally, and try to get to yoga classes and the beach as often as I can! :sun:

Can’t wait to get to know you all better! Thanks! :blue_heart:

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Welcome. Good luck with the fire season… :frowning:

You may find a certain amount of cynicism about story telling - many of us gravitate to open source projects to avoid that. Truth telling is better.

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Welcome Inês!

If @MissyQ says you have to break your toe in your first year, don’t believe her - I’m pretty certain it’s not a requirement for passing your probation!

Also, you can’t mention your dog & not pay the dog tax. Now you have to post a pic of Sally (pretty please)

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Welcome!

It’s good to see attention being given to community needs. HA has a very large and diverse group of users, and it’s probably difficult for the development team to keep up with what’s being said by users here and on other community platforms.

I recommend spending some time with the “WTH” and “Feature Request” threads. This is where real users ask (hopefully politely) for things which their experience suggests will help make HA even better.

Where we probably don’t need a whole lot more attention is “dumbing down” HA to satisfy the new users with only a casual interest. Frankly, HA’s only purpose is to help us, the users, manage the complex and extremely diverse systems we’ve built. No two are the same, and no-one who is really serious about this wants functionality removed or hidden behind a pretty, less intimidating UI. We know what we want to do, and we don’t need an uncluttered interface which makes us jump through hoops, or repeat the same clicks over and over, just to do routine maintenance and development.

Anyway, I’ll climb down off my soap box now and reiterate a hearty Welcome to the Team! I’m looking forward to the great things I’m sure you’ll be contributing, as well as pictures of the dog.

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I, too, welcome you, Inês and as CaptTom steps down, I step up on the soap box.

In order to be sustainable, HA (and every living thing) needs to be welcoming to new members. The knowledge of users that “move on” must not be lost when they do. HA is competing against THE most powerful entities on Earth. These entities are not benign nor benevolent. They will do no evil and will annihilate HA when they get around to it.

The learning curve for HA is incredibly steep. I had an easier time learning Fortran IV in 1970. This is because the documentation was robust, complete and authoritative. Since then I have learned dozens of languages and none as difficult has HA.

My perspective is that in order grow HA, the learning curve has to be made less steep. The GUI is clunky, but a good first step. One way to make it better is to be better documented. I find the documentation, in general, nearly adequate some pages better than others. Please see my suggestions in the thread Why hide every thing? thread.

Stepping down …

Welcome aboard :slight_smile:

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Hi! Yes, fire season always takes a toll on Portugal :cry: As for the cynicism, I hear you! But I don’t think truth telling and storytelling are mutually exclusive - my job won’t be to spin anything, it’s to make sure your work and projects get noticed and acknowledged :slightly_smiling_face:

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Was unaware of the dog tax!! Hopefully showing you Sally’s “Baby Yoda ears” is enough to settle my debt:

Sally
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Hi! Thank you for the welcome! We’re definitely making an effort to expand our community work and the more people we have, the more we can dedicate ourselves to all the different sides of our community, from beginners to experienced users! Thanks for the suggestions on threads to keep an eye on - and dog tax has been paid :slightly_smiling_face:

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Hi! For sure, HA is very intimidating, especially for beginners! And thanks for the suggestions!

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Orton says hello to Sally - or he will when he wakes up.

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Rude. I’ll have you know I’ve gone well over a year without another broken toe!! :face_with_steam_from_nose:

Welcome to the foundation, Inês!! I am so excited to have you around. Now I can quietly sneak out of the community without them noticing I’ve gone missing.

…wait, who said that?

:face_with_hand_over_mouth:

For real, though, having someone around to help highlight the cool shit this community does while also helping me improve the spaces we have the community gathering is very much a welcomed thing. :sparkling_heart:

If the people who have been around a while forgot, we used to do community highlights on our blog, posted by @klaasnicolaas. Consider what Inês will be doing an extension of this. :head_shaking_vertically:

And to be clear, I’m not going anywhere. I just get to handle bigger problems now. :sweat_smile:

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Welcome Ines.

My turn on the soap box ?

I discovered HA about 5 years ago, and it didn’t take long to decide that HA is “by engineers for engineers”, as highlighted by HA’s overly technical documentation. Not quite as bad as the steep learning mountain that is linux, but definitely not a curve for people without an IT background.

I got into programming in the late 70’s, so I do understand that developers are highly motivated … but motivated to add the next feature - not to write documentation ! There is definitely a place for Technical Documentation, especially for HA - but it should complement introductory material and even a few tutorials … all of which seems to have been left for vloggers.

But I am also a user. I want my computer and my home automation to DO something, and if it takes me less than a week to figure out how to do it, so much the better ! I want up-to-date and accurate information (not out-of-date blogs and vlogs), preferably with some worked examples.

I have seen and appreciate the change in attitude from Paulus and others at the top to make HA more user friendly. I also appreciate the scope of HA, that it is an ever-moving target, and that even in Nabu Casa there will be office politics - meaning that any change takes time. I understand that most HA developers are hobbyists contributing their “spare” time and effort, and so do what they feel motivated to do - not paid employees who can be managed.

As an older person I find I have become resistant to change … but after periods of adjustment I am happy that the GUI changes were worthwhile; and my impression is that HA’s documentation is gradually becoming more user oriented. It could do with a major restructure - but I know HA won’t stay still long enough for that.

If only the same were true of ESPHome, where the split between the developer elite and users seems more apparent than ever. Developers no longer visit the community forum, instead requiring interactions through discord or github - both of which are particularly unfriendly to new users. I really would like to know how many Problem Reports are closed as “stale” because no developer has even bothered to look at them.

I see the same questions asked again and again (both here in the forums and on github), leading me to wonder if the search functions are not prominant enough. I see github is now considered by developers as the place for questions, discussion, and reporting problems - effectively creating a separate forum for the developers away from users.

I suggest we could do with more active forum moderation to create an interface between non-technical users and the developer sub-communities. This would include pointing users to previous answers to common questions, collecting details and escalating actual problems to github issues, and generally managing the issues.

< end soapbox >

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Moderators are primarily here to ensure the forum rules are followed and to help with technical issues involving the forum functionality. Not to provide Home Assistant technical support. That is the community’s role.

We spend a lot of time in the background that you do not see reviewing first posts and weeding out spammers.

The fact that we do provide Home Assistant support when we can is a bonus.

As for interfacing with the developers, we have no special inside knowledge of their goings on. All the information we provide is a repeat of what is already publicly available to the community.

We do have a role for especially active community members, “Regulars”. They do have the ability to perform tasks like moving posts to the correct category.

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Maybe it’s just me being a grumpy old man.

Firstly I will express my appreciation for the forum moderation that you Moderators do; and I was not suggesting that the current limited number of moderators don’t do enough already.

Yes, you are correct that Technical Support should not be added to the forum moderators role.

… and that worked while the developers were part of that community. But now it feels more like the blind leading the blind :frowning:

I keep seeing well-meaning users give advice that is years out of date … like do a custom install of HA in docker on a linux PC … or don’t use ESP32 because Espressif just lie about their having low power modes … or you have to use MQTT to communicate with HA. I do understand that when the tool you are familiar with is a hammer, most problems look like nails. But it is frustrating that the people with the actual detailed knowledge have abandoned the community. Was it worse to receive a “go read the source code” or the current silence ?

OTOH as a former programmer myself I do understand the attraction of getting away from the never-ending flood of trivial questions from newbies who can’t be bothered to RTFM or do a search of the forum … but it has created a two-tier system with the elite over in discord and github where non-technical users are easily intimidated.

Rather than just grumping about the situation, I wonder how it can be improved.

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It Certainly seems like You have misunderstood Inês Introduction and major future Role in OHF , Im sure she’s happy that it’s focusing on the “positive” parts of i.e this forum.

Btw. Welcome Inês :tada:

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What a cutie! Mars would be a big fan of her.

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That Chihuahua sometimes stays with us and even though being a typical yapping dog to everyone and everything with his owner, with us he’s very cool, never barks.

Welcome Inês :waving_hand:
Haffun!

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This may be partly because posts in the forum have changed dramatically even over the last six months. When I look at new posts now I see fewer of them - a list of very, very specific questions about things I have never heard of (not that that means much).

As I write, the latest post is: How to setup ZHA and Matter/Thread with Proxmox using 2x SMlight SLZB-07(mg24)

The forum is a good place to ask these questions because someone, somewhere will know the answer, but I doubt if the developers do. Compulsive responders like me will give well-meaning but stupid advice because we have no idea what we’re talking about. I don’t see many trivial questions from newbies any more (my speciality).

Maybe the UI has reached the point where for most people it just works?