Somewhere in the midst of IFA Berlin, a 10-year-old boy stopped at the Open Home Foundation booth to talk about his Home Assistant setup, while his parents stood by with no idea what he was talking about. It’s the first thing Andrej Friesen, a community volunteer working the booth that day, brings up when you ask him about the week: “It is amazing what open source can do. It’s about more than being a smart home platform or a hobby – it is a playground for kids who are curious about technology,” he says.
Andrej has been using Home Assistant since 2017, and regularly hosts community meetups near Cologne, Germany. He was one of the eight community volunteers who joined Open Home Foundation staff members, along with people from our commercial partners Nabu Casa and Apollo Automation, at our first-ever booth at IFA Berlin this year. And it was also the first time we’ve officially invited the community to work at an event with us. After all, our projects exist because of the people who use, build and improve them every day, so who better to show visitors what they’re all about?
It certainly paid off: all eight generously donated their time, skills, and years of hard-won knowledge. With a great many of our visitors arriving from all over Germany, their ability to speak the same language was a real bonus!
We built our IFA booth to be like a home, now let’s meet the people who opened the doors and welcomed everyone in...
Day one, name badges on
Michael came from Dresden, where he’s spent five years in the community, becoming an integration owner, core member and language leader along the way. Alona splits her time between Berlin and Oxford, researching how homes can cut their CO2 emissions with automations through the open-sourced reduceCO2today.org. Andreas arrived from Frankfurt, where he’s a German language leader for voice in Home Assistant. Olli came from Cologne, where he’s part of our Creator Network through his blog and a video channel. Pieter has run Home Assistant since 2018, while Jörg and Stef are also both everyday users.
Our brave volunteers (from left to right, top to bottom): Andrej, Michael, Alona, Andreas, Olli, Pieter, Jörg, and Stef.
Most of them had never worked a trade fair booth before. But they walked into a team already in motion and keen to offer support – Open Home Foundation staff unpacking boxes and amiably disagreeing about cable routing – and within a day you could tell we were all part of the same community.
“Honestly, it felt less like staffing a booth and more like hanging out with friends. Nobody cared whether you’d contributed a core integration or just once renamed a light entity… If you were there, you were part of the team,” says Alona. Stef adds that in the calm before the storm, “it was lovely to get to know the crew and community behind my most important pieces of software!”
Our volunteers, slightly outnumbered
Since this was our debut booth at an event like IFA – which draws the general public alongside tech and industry insiders – we weren’t sure whether our message of privacy, choice, and sustainability would resonate in a hall built around product launches and flashy corporate stands. We needn’t have worried. It turned out to be exactly what visitors wanted to talk about.
“Random visitors would stop, say ‘oh, I use Home Assistant,’ and then pull out their phone to show me their amazing setups. I went there to show people what Home Assistant can do and instead spent half the time being shown what it can do. Many of these visitors had solved problems I hadn’t even thought of,” recalls Alona.
Pieter found the same thing happening at his end of the stand. “I found it great how enthusiastic people were about Home Assistant and the other Open Home Foundation projects – often, they came by the booth to tell us about all the great things they’d set up,” he says. One of his highlights was the younger visitors: children and teenagers who turned up to report they’d automated their entire bedroom, then asked for help convincing their parents to move the rest of the house over.
Others arrived with nothing to ask at all, stopping by purely to say “Thank you for Home Assistant.” For Olli, those were his favorite moments: “Talking to so many different users and companies about the most fun topic in the world: smart homes!”
Start them young!
Open source, open to chat
Our booth had nothing to sell, which takes some adjusting to in an environment built for exactly that – but it’s also why having community members on hand to chat worked so well. “The concept of the booth was to portray the non-commercial approach of the Open Home Foundation, and show that this was not just another trade stand with sales reps trying to sell the latest products,” explains Andreas.
When people asked Michael what the Open Home Foundation was for, he got to watch the answer land. His favorite moments of the week were “explaining the Open Home Foundation’s mission to them, and seeing the relief on their faces.” The T-shirts our booth staff wore did some of the work, too. Jörg spent a good part of the week in conversations with people from other stands, “often sparked by our ‘Open Source, Open to Chat’ outfits!” he notes.
There was always time for a quick beer after wrapping up for the day. Plus, Olli sports our inviting T-shirt!
And throughout all this, somebody managed to connect to a smart bulb on a neighboring stand and set up an automation for it... Stef still rates it as the funniest thing to happen at IFA, but history does not record whose idea this was 😉
What we learned at IFA (mostly about shoes)
While IFA was the first time we had community volunteers on a stand with us, it won’t be the last! In fact, we’ll be actively recruiting more community volunteers for all sorts of events: so watch this space. With that in mind, we asked everyone what they’d tell a future volunteer, hoping for something lofty about open source. Four of the eight talked about shoes.
For the record: Andreas recommends comfy shoes with heel support, Olli votes for comfortable shoes and cough drops, Alona similarly suggests throat sweets, because “you will talk more in one day than in a normal week,” and Pieter says be sure to drink enough water. Five days on a trade fair floor is an endurance sport that nobody trains for.
Our meetup in Berlin, ahead of the Community Day one on November 7.
And Andrej has one last piece of advice: “In the meantime, go to meetups! And if there aren’t any in your area, organize one yourself. You’ll meet like-minded people, make new friends, and build our community,” he says.
Community Day is coming on Saturday November 7 – just saying! 😉
Thank you, Alona, Andreas, Andrej, Jörg, Michael, Olli, Pieter, and Stef, for the hours, the patience and the company. You made it look easy.
And if you want to follow Andrej’s advice on creating a meetup, check out our latest blog post on Community Day.