An item, from my perspective, would be this: we have a marketing mailing list that is lightly used at the moment … could we move some of these marketing discussions over there so that we can start moving ahead with some plans. I know that 42 is still in flux as we hash out things, but maybe starting to organize some teams, start sharing ideas, and then coming back with specific questions. Just my $.02. Sincerely, Bob Martens

On Jul 1, 2015, at 8:55 AM, Robert Schweikert wrote:

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Thanks for getting this started.

On 07/01/2015 01:44 AM, Home wrote:

...

Dear community,

I wanted to come into the overarching discussion of defining out target audience for the project after reviewing the board’s presentation at oSC15. At this meeting the discussed a few key points with which they are making a proposal to the team to work on a more targeted audience to build the strength of the project.

While many of us can agree or disagree that the Board’s intention is correct, incorrect, relevant or irrelevant. I believe there is great insight to be gained from their proposal to think about for the very near future. I feel that if we do not put cards on the table, we lose the ways in which we are strong together and weak by ourselves.

For a very long time, even before the Board explained this improved aim, we have had issues or deep thoughts about where the project is going; what the project’s direction is. When will we be able to think of the project as a driving force in Open Source? These are a few things that matter and are worth reviewing.

It seems that every so often we work on doing an introspection to find the strength within to continue with the project.

With this introduction in mind, I invite you to read on. This email will be long, you have been warned!

The Board explained in our most recent conference that the current project seems aimless, given that we tend to be the distribution of everyone doing everything, and at the same time, being the distribution that does nothing and belongs to no one. Our aim seems lost and we must find it to gain strength and followers.

The openSUSE Board did an exercise where they placed different audiences against a set of core features that are part of the distribution and project. The clever arrangement showed the amount of connections that a target audience could make with our current technologies, particular to openSUSE.

They noted that despite the lack of marketing done for this distribution for 13.2, we nonetheless had the highest download numbers ever for our distribution. So, there is something to say about the distribution that works itself as a popular choice underground; without much intervention, or that the methods we were able to use last minute, were really good and strong.

They defined the openSUSE’s areas of strength. They are tools, packages, and distributions. It should be noted that these are very technically centered, where there could probably be room for other areas of strength in the project. However, we can leave that discussion for later.

They considered ISVs but were quickly ruled it out because of their lack of connections to the areas of strength. They also matched system administrators, and developers. Again the list was short and oriented to the technical audience.

Given these strengths the Board felt that our highest “match” would be a developer audience looking to find a solid distribution where their development environments would be stable and productive.

Throughout the discussion, I took a few notes and questions that I invite the Board and all of us to try to answer. By “answer” I mean “answer.” Please shy away from confrontational discussions on values, morals, personal attachment and look at this discussion in the light of the evidence and what seems rational, sensical, and forward-thinking.

Here are some questions that I think we should think about from a Marketing standpoint. Some of them are more fundamental than others but for each of their particular value, please take a minute to ponder and provide feedback.

1. The project looks for marketing strength in the light of the technologies that the distribution currently ships with each distribution. Kiwi, OBS, Tumbleweed, etc. Are the strengths of the project only based on technological advancement?

At present I would say our strength as a project is clearly centered around our technologies. Other areas of the community, event organization, marketing have suffered significant setbacks over the last few years. I think we need to find ways to re-start this part of the community, reach out to encourage new contributors to help with marketing etc.

...

If yes or no, which ones do you think are a strength to the project and which ones do you think are not valuable to the project? Should they all be technical, should they not?

There is, IMHO, much value to be added to the community by building an active part of the community that is interested in marketing and other non technical aspects of the project. Marketing as well as event organization is an ongoing engagement with peak activities around a release or an event. In between those peaks there is lots to do and to contribute. May it be the article that highlights a gem (not a Ruby Gem ;) ) in a new Tumbleweed release or highlights new cross team projects or other things. It does require getting to know the "right" people.

...

2. The Board feels that a Developer audience, and maybe a System Administrator audience, is a strong focal point for our marketing. What are the strengths and weaknesses of approaching, via marketing, to these two main audiences?

Not being a marketer in my naive view there could be two profiles in a marketing campaign that use "The Makers Choice" one profile targets sysadmins with messages that focus around stability long term support (with the new release), devops tools etc. The second profile could focus on developers with messages that are constructed a pretty stable yet fast moving development platform (Tumbleweed, you guessed it ;) ).

Thus, this would be true to the idea of not changing the nature of our project, i.e. we continue to do what we do, but we pull out certain areas to focus messaging around those technical strengths.

Do we need a marketing campaign to attract non-technical contributors? Maybe. We can probably also find a way to form a profile under "The Makers Choice" for that effort.

...

3. Given the lesser marketing push for 13.2, which resulted in increased download numbers, should we think of a strong push for marketing through our traditional channels? Making the counter, creating banners for online sites such as Facebook, Google +, Twitter. Creating a page on our site to promote the release, creating a release announcement to distribute, etc.

4. What are the thoughts around the strength of a developer community versus other target audiences such as education, public service, finance, medicine, research, general public, non-technical users, gamers, etc? What are the merits of a developer community target as opposed to others?

I think all of those are fair targets, eventually. But if all done at once we once again end up with everything for everyone, i.e. nothing for anybody. Again, from a naive marketing point of view, i.e. mine ;) , there should be nothing wrong with creating a campaign that targets developers and sys-admins (see the profiles idea above) and run with that for a while. A year or two down the road we can pick new targets and start building on past successes.

...

5. If there is a marked marketing strategy resulting in practical application, what the core activities that we should do for the project in marketing terms to target a developer audience versus what we currently do?

6. The project is large and has a few diverse areas of focus. If we are targeting developers, should we keep or remove initiatives that do not align with the target audience in hopes that by concentrating efforts into one audience will produce a better outcome in the end? For example, why work on integrating so many desktop platforms when a developer might simply care to have support for specific languages, a command line, a text editor and a compiler?

The point of the marketing effort is not to change the nature of the project, i.e. tell people to stop working on some things and work on others. That by the way is not even possible, everyone needs to work on what they are interested in ;) . Additionally developers are desktop users too and thus having a choice in desktops is probably appreciated by developers.

If there are new areas that are identified through marketing and communication efforts where we currently lack then it is definitely worth the conversation to see if we can attract people to help build up those technical areas.

...

If a development environment is an aim, should we not remove efforts that go into areas unrelated to a development environment?

Nope, see above. The marketing campaign should highlight and broadcast certain aspects of the project. Think of it as a lens or magnifying glass through which one only sees the parts that the campaign focuses on. That does not imply that everything around this should have to stop. Everything else should continue and then we can use different lenses, i.e. other marketing campaigns to focus on other areas.

My $0.02, Robert

- -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU Public Cloud Architect LINUX rjschwei@suse.com IRC: robjo -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2

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Le 01/07/2015 15:55, Robert Schweikert a écrit :

At present I would say our strength as a project is clearly centered around our technologies.

your are right. But it's mostly from initiatives (obs, studio) that do not come from the community but from SUSE or SUSE people (may be at free time). These initiative where extremely well done and interesting. Because they are related to infrastructure. what we have to understand is that when developers develop, usually they do not develop for themselves and so they attract a large bunch of people. So attracting developers is a very good thing. that said I do not see how we can make a marketing campaign to them? They are mostly people that know what they do.

There is, IMHO, much value to be added to the community by building an active part of the community that is interested in marketing and other non technical aspects of the project.

that's always true, but how can we do that?

...

system Administrator audience,

I'm not sure system administrator have the choice. We have to convince people that decide. Around me decisions are often made by commercials and the administrator is hired after, then he can change very little things. Hope I'm wrong :-(

others. That by the way is not even possible, everyone needs to work on what they are interested in ;)

it's not completely true. People works on thing they expect to be useful and fun. Nobody translate a wiki for fun, really, nor sort out a forum for fun. But if the forum is really useful, people will come for it. If we (the project community) collectively decide that the wiki (for example only) is the main goal of the next year, I guess we will find people to work on it. Having a fun community is the main goal. . Additionally developers are

desktop users too and thus having a choice in desktops is probably appreciated by developers.

don't forget also we are not alone, if upstream kde is well done, integrating it in openSUSE may be simple enough to do it

If there are new areas that are identified through marketing and communication efforts where we currently lack then it is definitely worth the conversation to see if we can attract people to help build up those technical areas.

yes thanks jdd -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

  -- Andres Betts On July 1, 2015 at 11:52:39 AM, Robert Schweikert (rjschwei@suse.com(mailto:rjschwei@suse.com)) wrote:

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On 07/01/2015 01:05 PM, Jay wrote:

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I'm having a huge cognitive dissonance after having read this.

Are you really sure you want to forego the "normal" user (like me) for developers/admins?

No, there is no foregoing intention.

But we do not want to/cannot compete with Mark Shuttleworth on the marketing front for the "normal" user, at least not at this point ;)

It is about defining a target group for focused marketing messaging. This does not imply we will attempt to change the nature of the project. Whatever you as "normal" user find appealing today is intended to remain just as it is.

...

I never thougth of openSUSE as the distribution for just those two groups.

It is not

...

For me it was always the least riskiest, easiest to install, high-quality alternative to Windows.

And I would be surprised if the good download-numbers for 13.2 came from developers and admins. I think they came from people who had a favourable experience with 12.3/13.1, from positive reviews and word of mouth.

But I may be wrong.

A focussing-strategy is almost never wrong. But you have to be prepared to make sacrifices. The more you focus and the more effective your strategy, the more you have to sacrifice. That is: loose those who do not belong to your target groups.

Given that we have no consistent marketing effort today we have to start somewhere. It is hard to compete, when there is one guy who is willing to shout from every rooftop of the world and from space how great X is. I do not see the risk that those that have already found us will run away just because a marketing message says "The Makers Choice for Developers". I agree that this will not attract many new "normal" users. However, these conditions were taken into consideration when the board came up with the proposal and hopefully it came across in the keynote.

...

And if your strategy really works, you can't come back in two years and say: "Now we want the desktop-user". Because then your position already is "The distribution for developers and sys-admins".

I am not certain I would agree with this. I could possibly agree if the nature of the project would change and we'd drop all the cool things we have for desktop users, but that is not the intent. We do have to keep "what's in the distribution and OBS" separate from "what do we broadcast to the world."

At present we broadcast, there is no more or less continuous broadcast as already mentioned, everything in the distro and OBS to the world. The proposal is that we narrow that broadcast to specific pieces that appeal to specific groups. This should make it easier to form a campaing around a given theme and be successful. In two years when we have more confidence and feel stronger maybe we do want to start broadcasting to a different target audience with different technical parts of the project backing up that broadcast. Marketing campaigns change all the time. Just because there is currently no active Unix to SUSE Linux marketing campaign doesn't mean that this is not still a good idea ;) It just means that at present marketing efforts are being spent elsewhere.

...

I don't say that's wrong. I just want to make you aware of the fact that this is a long-term strategic decision that you can not change just like that.

And you will have to live with the consequences.

I do not see it this dire. If it were, I'd say we'd have no car company that makes trucks and cars in many varieties all under the same brand. Look at Chevy, Ford, you name it. They market to different target audiences with different messages. When the target audience are people that work in construction you see a truck in the add not the little car with a hybrid engine. When the target audience are people that care about fuel consumption the picture and slogan are tailored to that group. It's still the same company, the products may even come from the same factory. Both products will have many nuts, bolts, and other things in common. The marketing of the products they produce is different for different audiences. We just don't have the people to create 5 or 6 different marketing campaigns all at once. It is not even certain if we have enough people interested in forming one marketing campaign for one target audience.

I think that you have pointed out a subject that we can review later. Maybe let’s keep this one for a different thread in the future. We could have multiple marketing strategies for different products done by openSUSE. Now we need 1, for a target audience of a higher technical background. In the future we could discuss further strategies for other related audiences.

We cannot boil the ocean. One campaign at a time ;)

Later, Robert

- -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU Public Cloud Architect LINUX rjschwei@suse.com IRC: robjo -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2

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Am Mittwoch, 1. Juli 2015, 21:35:58 schrieb Martin Schlander:

Onsdag den 1. juli 2015 19:38:46 skrev Jay:

...

Are you really sure you want to forego the "normal" user (like me) for developers/admins?

I never thougth of openSUSE as the distribution for just those two groups. For me it was always the least riskiest, easiest to install, high-quality alternative to Windows.

And I would be surprised if the good download-numbers for 13.2 came from developers and admins.

Hey, you were the one most positive about turning openSUSE into something only a grumpy old sysadmin can love >:-)

No! I was the one most positive about turning it into something only a grumpy old USER! longing for reliability and continuity can love! ;) And I didn't know then what I know now! I've been used! ;)

Sorry. Couldn't resist.

Unforgivable lack of will power! ;) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org