Hey there @rocksetta – adding the "Particle employee" perspective to the mix here. Before I get started, a couple notes on community discourse that apply here as well as every other thread on our community:
FIrstly,
As @dougal pointed out, these are community forums. If this were a blog written on your own web properties, you would have an ability to control who responds to your public posts. If you want to have a private conversation with someone from the team, tagging us (using the @ symbol, then our community handle), is the best way to get our attention.
Although we can't be in every thread, there are plenty of us at Particle whose job it is to listen and support our developer customers. Not sure who to tag? Consider
- @will (me) – GM of our Developer Tools business
- @joe – Community Manager
- @rickkas7 – Technical Documentation Writer
- @bsatrom – Developer Advocate
- @jberi – Senior Product Manager
- @mstanley and @ParticleD – Technical Support
Secondly,
The first rule of etiquette in these forums that applies to every single member is the following:
Several posts in this thread are flirting with that line. To everyone – a quick reminder that there is no excuse for rudeness here. Period.
Thirdly,
Since we've launched Mesh, I have certainly noticed your increased engagement with the product and with the forums. Reading your posts, it sounds like there you had some specific educational use cases in mind for Mesh that you're struggling to realize with the current state of the product and pricing.
Thank you for your feedback and participation – our goal is help our customers be successful with our products, and the best way for us to do so is to learn directly from your experiences. As others have mentioned, we have a couple of programs that cater to educators using Particle in the classroom, including our Particle for Good program as well as a non-public Educator program.
I'll send you a PM to find a time where we can chat about your experience with Mesh, your goals as an educator, and the ways that Particle can (as well as cannot) commit to addressing your areas of constructive feedback.
Lastly, to clarify and address a legal issue that you raised,
Particle is a member of the Thread Group in order to gain IP rights to ship products built on Thread. Particle leverages OpenThread, an open source implementation of the Thread standard, to power Particle Mesh, the mesh networking solution for IoT products built on Particle.
The purpose of the Thread certification is to ensure that end products that implement Thread have done so correctly such that interoperability between products is possible, though it is by no means mandatory in order to receive IP rights.
For context, Thread was created by Nest as a mesh networking technology for the connected home, where interoperability between off-the-shelf products from a variety of hardware manufacturers might be valuable to the end consumer. In other words, certification it is there to protect end customers from crappy implementations of Thread (on products which bear the Thread logo) that prevent their smart home from functioning successfully.