Possible Agenda Items (I will edit this in place if I add / remove anything prior to the Meeting):
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(1) Brief discussion about the the new “FAQ” Category(ies) on the Forum:
Intended for Community Drafted FAQs on any topic that any member wishes to contribute. The discussion responses on each FAQ Topic can be used for corrections and revision suggestions that the OP is encouraged to edit / roll-up back into the main Topic post. We would appreciate SmartThings engineers to keep an eye out for these FAQs and let us know if there are errors.
NB: These “Community FAQs” are meant as a supplement to SmartThings official Documentation and Knowledge Base entries. Over time, many “Community FAQ Topics” will probably become obsolete and replaced with official ones.
Community FAQs can and should include “Known Unresolved Issues, Feature Requests, (& Workarounds) Topics”, and these can be individually deprecated as the issues are fixed. (These might reduce redundant reports of the same problem over and over again.) -
(2) “New Capabilities” Category: I would like to encourage contributions; (a) new unique Capabilities (even if incremental to existing Caps), and (b) feedback and discussion on open Capability requests.
Also: I drafted a proposed process for advancing New Capability Requests into the “Final Review” and implementation phases:
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(3) Services As Things: Two recent New Capability Topics are “Capability Send Message” and “Capability External Logging”. These imply Device Types that are services (like web services) – and certainly (?) can be implemented on the current Platform. They are, however, different from many existing “Things” – they are quite ethereal. Regardless, I think the concept of encapsulating common and useful services as a Capability and SmartDevice Types is a great way to add modularity to the Platform. Instead of repeating code in many SmartApps to write to GroveStreams, for example, there could be a GroveStreams Device Type.
This will be interesting to explore in practice, however: When does functionality belong in a Device vs. in a SmartApp? Or when does it belong in both? Actually, we have many existing examples of Service Devices that are managed with a Service Manager SmartApp, right? So, hopefully, this concept is really not a big deal.