Community Round Table

Forgive me if this has already been suggested but I’d like to suggest something. Bare with me. Some time ago I was researching our family tree for my kids using Ancestry.com. When my free trial ended I was contacted not too long after if I would be interested in coming to Ancestry.com’s headquarters and doing a round table discussion. Of course I was! At the discussion eight other users and myself sat in a small auditorium facing a few dozen Ancestry.com staff. Everyone had a slightly different experience but I think mine was the most removed. I didn’t have an active subscription. They wanted to know why. And they wanted to know what would entice me to pay for a subscription. They asked us questions and we asked them questions. One comment I made was about a sister website that I got a lot of great information from. I got cheers form that section of the audience. I guess it was a side project that they wanted to get off the ground but no one seemed to have noticed. Then we got a tour of their facilities. It was amazing. It put into perspective how much of a value my free trial really was. We met the folks that were in the trenches. The developers, the researchers, the scientists, the people that have to manually take a picture of each document. Not scanned, an actual picture. Thousands of them. It was a great experience to see a living organization. One that breathed in it’s users and breathed out results. It kind of reminds be of Smartthings and it’s community.

There are obviously some passionate individuals here who are doing things that are definitely out of the box. That term actually doesn’t give some community members efforts justice. And there are users that really want to know what is going on. They , like me, want to have a vested interest. My suggestion is to gather a few individuals and meet them in person. Have a good open discussion. Deliver some of these messages that Smartthings wants everyone to know in person. And when the day is done give everyone involved an arrival sensor and a year’s worth of batteries! I kid, I kid! Ok, done. I haven’t done my daily “ask Alexa when the Echo Dot will be available” routine so I’ll do that now. Thanks for stopping by. Alexa, good night.

2 Likes

Something like this?