WebThings Monthly Public Meetings

WebThings
#1

Hi everyone,

Quick links:

Since the WebThings project has flown the nest from Mozilla and is now operating under a new open governance system, one of the ways we would like to invite more direct community involvement is through monthly public meetings.

The purpose of these meetings is to discuss the direction of the project, review the progress we’ve made over the last month, plan the next sprint/release and discuss other topics such as events and evangelism.

The current plan is that the meetings will take place at 18:00 GMT/19:00 CET/10:00 PST on the last Thursday of the month. That makes the first meeting on 2021-01-28T18:00:00Z, just under two weeks from now. You can keep up to date with the meeting times by subscribing to a public calendar (iCal), which also includes the Google Meet link to join the meeting.

This meeting time was chosen to be a reasonable hour for the US and Europe where most of our current contributors are, and the date was chosen to be a good time for a retrospective/planning meeting at the end of each month. The date and time are subject to change if we find that doesn’t work well for people, so let us know if that’s the case for you.

You are cordially invited to join us for the first public meeting, in which we hope to have time for you to:

  1. Introduce yourself (if you would like to)
  2. Tell us what it is you’d like to see from the WebThings project
  3. How you would like to contribute.

This meeting will not be recorded, but we will keep meeting notes so that if you are not able to attend you can read about what was discussed. You can also use the #iot channel on chat.mozilla.org for text-based chat during the meetings and be sure to familiarise yourself with of our code of conduct.

Hope to see you there!

Community Events (Online+Offline)
#2

Reminder: This is happening tomorrow! Hope to see you there.

#3

Hi @benfrancis,

Unfortunately not a good time of day for me, have fun!

If there’s a chance that times might vary in future then 9:00-17:00 and 8:00-10:00 GMT are currently best for me.

Have fun!

Cheers :slightly_smiling_face:

#4

Ah, sorry @madbilly it’s a shame this time doesn’t work well for you. Unfortunately 08:00-17:00 GMT is 00:00-09:00 PST and 23:00-08:00 AKST where many of our contributors are which isn’t great for them either and I personally can’t make 16:00 or 17:00 GMT so it would have to be 15:00 GMT which is 06:00 in Alaska.

These are always the challenges of organising a meeting spanning multiple timezones. The current time is optimised for the Europe/US split of the majority of current contributors, but is particularly bad for Asia, where it’s 02:00 in Taipei for example :frowning:

We can certainly discuss whether there’s a better time that works well for the majority though.

#5

Hi @bfrancis,

No problem, I only mentioned the times so that I’d expressed an interest. As you know I’m not even contributing at the moment never mind part of the core team so please don’t think of reorganising on my account. The meeting time should be organised for the core team and anyone else who can join is a bonus really.

Have a good meeting.
Cheers :slight_smile:

#6

It was a pleasure attending the first version of this event.
@bfrancis, thanks for making it public.
Nasir

1 Like
#7

Thank you to the 20 people who joined our first public meeting last month, it was great to see so many faces and hear about your ideas for WebThings!

Our next meeting is this Thursday, 25th February at 18:00 UTC. Please see the first post in this thread for all the details.

#8

Hi @bfrancis,

I just read the meeting notes and since I can’t attend the meetings I’ll give you my answers to some of the questions which were asked:

What would you like to see from WebThings? (features, modules, direction etc.)

  • Fix the bug which stops web notifications working on Firefox for Android (okay, not vision, but it’s important to me)
  • Fix for the issues which restrict a single adapter to use the Bluetooth connection at a time. This may be an underlying Linux, Bluez, issue, I’m not sure. However if there was some sort of Bluetooth connection management within the Gateway this could solve it
  • Adapter for standard Micro:Bit Bluetooth profile to allow people to just use Micro:bit’s built in features for all sorts of things and easily connect to the Gateway
  • Adapter for Bluetooth UART and a library in an appropriate language (e.g. MakeCode, but MicroBlocks could also be okay) to make a Micro:Bit represent itself as an arbitrary WebThing
  • Library, ideally in Arduino (from my point of view), to make use of the IP support profile in Bluetooth (IPSP), probably built on 6lowpan, to make a Bluetooth native device appear as a native WebThing by running an HTTP server or use the forthcoming WebThing protocol. This could then talk to the Gateway via Bluez which I think already supports IPSP and routing so the Bluetooth device should be visible to the Gateway. This might need configuration within the Gateway OS levels.

Unfortunately both my lack of time and my lack of competence prevents me from doing the above myself.

What do you plan to use WebThings for?

  • Automation of my own home
  • Making my own native WebThings for my own purposes. So far I’ve only used Arduino with ESP8266 devices but I’d like to use nRF51 and 52 devices.

Cheers :slightly_smiling_face:

*Bluetooth means BLE.

1 Like
#9

:mega: Reminder: Our next meeting is Thursday 25th March at 18:00 UTC. Hope to see you there.

#10

:mega: Reminder: Our next meeting is Thursday 29th April at 18:00 BST (UTC+1).

1 Like
#11

Hi all,

I’m afraid I’ve had to cancel tomorrow’s WebThings Monthly Public Meeting, but I’ve been in touch with module owners to check things are moving forward.

As things stand the next meeting will be 24th June, hope to see you all there!

As always, you can find us on this forum or in the #WebThings channel at chat.mozilla.org.

Ben

#12

:mega: Reminder: Our next meeting is tomorrow, Thursday 24th June at 18:00 BST (UTC+1).