Community Day 2025 Wrap-up
Missy Quarry
Our first Home Assistant Community Day was a humbling success — we knew that the community had a desire to have something coordinated like this, but we really did not expect just how widely this would spread. 💖
So much happened in such a short window of time, so let’s talk about how this year’s event went and what the future looks like for Home Assistant meetups.
It started with a question…
Home Assistant Community Day was born from a conversation last year where we asked, “Would the community even want this?” We dropped hints here and there to test how y’all would react to a worldwide event, and after weeks of planning, the response to the event announcement was overwhelmingly positive. 🤩
First, THANK YOU 🙏🏻 to all the hosts for their local coordination, community members who showed up, and the venues that made all this possible. I learned so much with your help, and it will make next year’s Community Day one to remember.
…that turned into a movement…
When I announced Home Assistant Community Day, I didn’t give hosts a lot to work with. I didn’t want the community to think they had to fit into a specific format, and wanted it to be unique to their region. It became clear pretty quickly what information was missing and what people wanted guidance on. For example, some asked for suggestions on what types of venues to book or which activities could make the event more interactive, such as quizzes or presentations. Your questions helped us make it easier for hosts to build cool events, thank you for those!
All around the world, everyone came together to talk about Home Assistant (and its related projects). You swapped hardware, you showed off your automations or dashboards, you participated in quizzes, and you formed new bonds with people in your area who share your passion for Home Assistant. Some people had custom swag printed, others received hardware from a couple of our Works With Home Assistant
…but not without complications
Swag was an unexpected complication. When I first announced the day, we planned to have me order the merch and then send it off to the hosts. This would require collecting addresses and sending packages to people around the world, and we realized quickly that the logistics of that would end up a mess. Instead, we made the sticker designs (along with the Luma calendar invite graphic) publicly available for the hosts to print something locally.
When we did this, we (as the Open Home Foundation) committed to reimbursing the hosts for these swag purchases, along with venue fees or other reasonable expenses they might have on the day. The idea being that no host should be out of pocket for supporting their local Home Assistant community. You support us (by contributing time or by being Home Assistant Cloud subscribers), and we want to give back to the community in any way we can.
I’m excited to share that we plan on using those same guidelines for any community meetup, not just the ones that happen on Community Day! 👏🏻 We’re building a new community page where all of these details will be available, so stay tuned for more information.
Some stats for the nerds
We had 82 events
We had events in every major region except Australia! Most meetups were in Europe and North America — probably not too surprising for most. The smallest events had 2 registered guests, and the event that had the largest number of registered guests was Utrecht, with 200!
With an average of 20 people attending a meetup, we know that we can advise a lower capacity limit for future events. This will be included as part of the guidelines we’ll have on that new community page I mentioned above.
Keep the fun going!
Many hosts told me that they’ve created a new space for the attendees to chat or that they were going to start doing some regular meetups (some have done both!). Since Luma worked so well for us for Community Day, I’ve created a general calendar for meetups
While we don’t have a solid date for next year’s Home Assistant Community Day, I can at least let you know that it will not be in May and instead later in the year. I’m aiming to give you at least a two-month heads-up for when it will be this time. We’re planning on doing something bigger and I can’t wait to do it all again with y’all next year. 😌
P.S. - Did you spot our refreshed Creator Network page yet? 👀