Agreed! I originally followed this proposal because I have a lot of smart devices, and getting them to talk to each other and with my network has been a bit of a pain...largely because of poor documentation on the part of the companies that produce them. The forums that are usually set up by these companies are usually difficult to navigate and often don't have much moderation by people who know how the respective devices work.
Often, there are great unofficial resources for various devices, but they aren't well organized (often random blog posts or links to isolated forum threads) and probably don't capture the expertise of people who don't have the time or interest in setting up a super detailed blog post. Uncovering information on the smart devices seems like something that could really benefit from a Q&A format.
If people issues with networking or software frameworks, SuperUser and StackOverflow seem like the go to place for this. Asking questions about IoT and connected devices, like Hue, Nest, WeMo, LaMetric, etc. seems like it doesn't quite fit well in any one bucket.
What it is*
I've seen a couple "specific device questions should be handled by the manufacturer" type comments in the sample questions, but I think this an area where this site could shine...specifically:
- Asking and answering questions where companies haven't been able to kick start a community of hacktivists and don't have the resources (or good sense) to do this well.
- Asking and answering questions that span two or more different service providers/companies (which aren't usually well fielded by the "manuals" of individual products, unless there is a specific partnership between the device manufacturers.
- At the very least, this site would be a good place to collect various resources for various devices and device type, since official and unofficial help sources, libraries, and guides tends to be dispersed in many different locations and formats.
What it is NOT*
I've seen a number of questions which pertain to the "philosophy" of IoT, it's implications, and the direction the industry may, may not, should, and should not go. While these strategic, moral, and philosophical discussions/debates are certainly worth having, I don't think the Q&A format, here, would work very well, given that there aren't particularly right or wrong answers.
I think general definition questions (what constitutes IoT and what does not) could also be fielded by the site, but I wouldn't really call it the primary objective.