Oliver, I’d like to introduce you to Jerome @Confectrician
Jerome maintains our documentation
I get the impression that you just create a PR, and it either gets accepted or not. Don’t worry too much about getting approval first. The PR itself is the request for approval, and it shows in a concrete manner, what you want to do without having to first “describe” it.
Great, thanks Andrew. Any idea about the website?
A while ago I think I read in an old post that it is not so easy to make changes there. But now it is time to take care of this…
We don’t need to restructure the entire workflow of how the web site is built. We just need a few changes here and there and that can be done by simply creating a PR.
We have to do the actual work.
That’s the point. Explaining what we plan to do, get advice from the maintainer and his consense in advance would not harm 
1 Like
Please help. I do not know where and how to do it.
We are talking about website only, correct? For documentation the process is clear to me.
http://github.com/openhab/ contains various repositories related to various things
http://github.com/openhab/website - is for the web site you see on openhab.org
http://github.com/openhab/openhab-docs is for the openhab.org/docs/
How to do it? That’s a whole other topic. Which editor do you use?
None. Don’t we use any of these authoring tools?
EDIT:
I understand the concept and the process now. Unfortunately this is not feasible for me to make changes in the .vue files and submit them as a PR.
I already have ideas in my mind to add/change content, I need some mre pages, but leave the existing menu as is.
Does that create a problem?
Can I interprete your question about which editor I use as an offer to create html pages and submit these as a PR?
No, I suck at web design / graphic design. I did make one suggestion about the main web site here
If I’m not mistaken the documentation is written in markdown
here is a link to the introduction page
https://github.com/openhab/openhab-docs/edit/main/introduction.md
the file extention is .md
it is just like a readme file on github
you format it just like on the forum here (almost)
heading text
You can edit it right there on github
clone a branch, do your edits, submit PR
Edit:
Here is a thread we used to create the Blockly documentation. The actual documentation in the first post got moved but the first dozen or so posts are Stephen, Rich and Jerome et al discussing how to develop and ultimately merge the documentation
1 Like
@Oliver2 I appreciate your enthusiasm and desire to get this going in a positive way. The world needs more of this sort of attitude. However, I think you need to approach this much differently.
Before you even begin thinking about websites, videos, and articles, you need a marketing strategy. People often jump straight to those end points without a clear understanding of what they’re trying to accomplish. You end up with a bunch of content that doesn’t have a cohesive message and often goes nowhere.
Your first point kind of hints at this, so I’m just giving you the technical term.
It’s a marketing strategy. But when you describe your plan in the first post, you’re a little too far ahead.
In my opinion, your second point isn’t going to work.
You’re presuming that everyone’s going to excitedly buy into your marketing strategy, but it’s pretty clear from that other thread that there’s very little agreement about what openHAB is and who it’s for. You’re also presuming that volunteers will sustain their interest.
If you don’t have timelines, then you don’t have a marketing strategy. What works now may not work next year. This doesn’t mean that you need to rush, but you need to have realistic milestones and deadlines. If openHAB didn’t have a development schedule, we might never get another release.
The way I’d go about it is to:
- Get the openHAB organization to strike a marketing committee (if there isn’t one already).
- Get people to commit to being on the marketing committee, and not just flake out if/when they get bored or frustrated. Even then, you’re taking them at their word (since no one’s getting paid).
- Have the marketing committee develop a marketing strategy for the organization’s approval.
- Recruit volunteers to develop websites, videos, articles, etc. that align with the approved strategy.
None of this can be accomplished through discussions in the openHAB community. You’ll just keep going around in circles (with people jumping in and out) until everyone gets tired of it. And then it’ll come up again three years from now when a person drops a one-liner post with a clickbait headline.
Side note: have any of you noticed that the person dropped that bomb on September 1 and never came back? They don’t actually care.
This is a red flag for me, because documentation and marketing are two very different things (I’ve done both). I support documentation that’s better for new users, but that’s known as technical writing. It doesn’t belong in a discussion about marketing, because docs have to work for all users–not just the audience that your marketing strategy targets.
A typical exercise is to build marketing personas–imaginary users who you describe in detail–so that you can visualize them when developing the strategy and tactics. The more character you give to a persona, the easier it is to see what will (and won’t) appeal to them about the product.
Jean is a chemical engineer in Montreal, divorced, with a son (14) and a daughter (10) who live part-time with their father. She’s tried home automation with Amazon/Google/Smartthings, but finds them to be frustratingly basic. Jean’s familar with open-source software and her son has talked about Raspberry Pi computers he uses at school, but she hasn’t used Linux in a long time and doesn’t want to spend a lot of time on it.
That’s just scratching the surface of a marketing persona. On her own, Jean might not be in the target audience for a marketing campaign…but maybe it’s something she could do with her kids. You would need maybe 10-15 more personas to get a sense of your overall audience and then hone in on the ones you can reach most effectively. That will guide you to what content should be produced.
Bottom line is that a lot of work goes into marketing strategy before you can even begin talking about content.
I’m not volunteering to get involved, because I don’t think any of this is necessary for an open-source software project. I don’t share the concern about openHAB’s existence being threatened, and wish people would stop fretting over an imaginary competition with Home Assistant. 
5 Likes
Marketing is much more than Promotion, i.e producing ads, websites, videos etc.
We need to get 3 other P’s in order, too. The key question is for whom is this product made? Surely not for everyone? Most of my friends would be never be able to take OH into use. If we want to enable them, e.g. the mass market, to use OH changes to the first P, the Product are needed.
If we are not going to change the product, then we need to specify who exactly is the target customer? This is needed so that we can design the marketing plan correctly and address the most probable “buyers”.
Trying to adress the whole market requires enormous resources that companies like Siemens, Nike, McDonalds and other global giants have.
As we have very limited resources it is vital to choose the right, most receptive market segment, in order to produce results from the marketing. We can spend all our time and resources selling to the wrong customers and no one will buy. This is not a new problem, a lot of marketing books have been written about this very problem. There are simple tools, like Kotler’s 4Ps and Moore’s positioning statement, that are very helpful when trying to reach results with limited marketing budgets.
I suggest we do not re-invent the marketing wheel. 
1 Like
I think the most likely customer is an expert system integrator, who wants to sell and install home automation systems at higher profit than is possible with current commercial products.
IMO, what we ultimately want to attract are skilled developers who will hopefully contribute to the project and improve openhab further. This is what will ensure that openhab will continue to exist.
But having many “end users” will also give us recognition and support from vendors, although this is not something to be relied upon, so it is really a secondary goal, if it were to be a goal at all.
Most of the “expert” system integrators would probably fall in the “end users” category. It would be very rare for them to (have the skills to) contribute back.
1 Like
This is exactly what we are doing here.
Not possible as can be read in the other thread
I think, it does. Maybe you are overestimating this initiative here. We want to attract new users and new developers.
Ok. To me it is both, new developers AND new users.
Do you have some ideas how to attract new developers? Wouldn‘t a potential new developer start as an ordinary openHAB user first?
Does anybody know if we can measure new users?
A bad metric could be new accounts for this forum or for myopenhab. Is there any way to get anonymized, condensed data like new logins in the last 3 years per month or quarter?
Moore writes specifically about “innovative high tech products”, which is the category OpenHAB falls under, no? According to him, to cross the chasm the product must be adapted and tailored to the early adopters. My understanding is that OH as an “innovative hight tech product” is yet to cross the chasm. It also seems clear there is no interest to do tailoring or adaptation to the product.
Under this limitation I think the wise thing to do is to identify the niche we plan the product for and aim all resources to reach this niche.
I think we need to differentiate a little bit. If adoption means to change fundamental concepts (like thing/channel/items) that is out of our scope as openhab is based on 3rd party products. I would not touch this area. Other adoption areas which we can address here with our developers might be something which can be discussed, but then Insuggest to open another thread. It will be difficult to find developers for that.
However, taking this into account:
Maybe a list of required adoptions might attract new developers? I don‘t know. I am not a developer. In any case, a separate thread for this topic is required to keep focus fir each topic.
To attract developers, it’s probably enough to just do some more marketing. openHAB is already a fantastic product for those who love coding.
1 Like
I see. Thanks.
We need to address, that it is not required to code (anymore) in order to customize openHAB. You have the option to do so to get a maximum of individual customization but it is not required