GatherPress

Simon Kraft: Meetup.com.

Patricia Brun Torre: Meetup.com.

Simon Kraft: Yes.

Patricia Brun Torre: To publish one of the events of the Geneva Meetup Group. And then I thought about tagging Mike O'Torey, who is one of the GatherPress project leads. And he just replied, everyone is welcome to join our weekly huddle. And the next one was 90 minutes later. That was timing. Yeah. So I joined and we talked about a lot of things and on every meeting since. And what they had been developing for two years, about two years. So I joined and I helped on internationalization, checking if every string could be translated, stuff like that, and testing. And then the main task was to publish a proposal on the community team P2 for people to look at what is it and what we would like. What we need to know is that meetup.com is the highest cost of WordPress community support.

Simon Kraft: It's around 200k per year.

Patricia Brun Torre: Exactly. And it's the highest cost. And it's so much money that could be spent on outreach. And why do I talk about outreach? Because some people think that maybe on meetup.com what is good is the discoverability. For example, you are in a city, you attend another, I don't know, business meeting or your yoga course, your yoga class, and then you are on meetup.com and you discover, oh, there is a meetup group around here. I think that was the case in the past and it's less and less the case because people discover the events in their dashboard, their site dashboard, and now on the fabulous event.wordpress.org website which lists everything. And we even had a person in the Lausanne meetup who came and I said, you are not on the list. And she said, I didn't want to create yet another account on meetup.com. on meetup.com.

Simon Kraft: We have that sometimes as well.

Patricia Brun Torre: Now, it's true that some people discover meetups for that, but I think it's mostly in the USA. I saw some traffic statistics, 60% of the traffic to meetup.com is from the US. So maybe it's a reality or it's in some place or it's less and less the case, but that was a reality in the past. But still, this 200k could be spent on outreach reach to for the for the events another thing is that meetup.com recently got acquired by another company the same that acquired evernote.

Simon Kraft: Last year that went great for evernote not okay.

Patricia Brun Torre: To each their opinion it's not me to judge but i mean some for.

Simon Kraft: Evernote it was the case that the new ownership at evernote they changed like pricing dramatically and made the product quite unattractive to like these these kinds of heavy users so i guess it's reasonable to be a bit afraid of what might come out of the meetup.com.

Patricia Brun Torre: Acquisition actually there are contracts that i'm not into that i don't know it's between wordpress community support and meetup.com so there are contracts and prices and stuff i don't i don't yeah.

Simon Kraft: Prices prices is the one thing but i mean today already you can compare to i don't know for how long have i been using meetup.com let's say if eight years Compared to eight years ago, Meetup.com is pushing some weird things in some places. Like, are you also interested in this and that? Would you like to have a coupon for this? Now I'm just signing up for a meetup, leave me alone.

Patricia Brun Torre: Yeah, right. And I received like 10 emails for one month to take over a business group in Geneva that I'm absolutely not interested in. So the thing is not to replace at once, like all the meetup groups have to go. The idea of the pilot program is to first have a pilot program, means testing it. So as soon as we have the green light and the plugin is a bit polished, because Mike and Mervyn have been receiving feedback from the plugin review team as well. But when it's polished and ready to go for version 1.0, and we have the green light from community leadership. So then the meta team will help integrate that in the WordPress.org ecosystem. And we have been collecting the groups that are interested to take part in the pilot program. So all the French-speaking Swiss groups are interested. There are two or three in Spain. There is one in Cusco, plus also all the learn.wordpress.org workshop would be there. Because if you want to follow a workshop from the training team on learnworkpress.org, for now you have to sign up for their meetup. Just to follow the online workshop. So that would really be something for the WordPress.org ecosystem, our network. Furthermore, on the profiles on WordPress.org, you could then have something listed like all the events you attended or organized. Like it's listed when you publish something on one of the make WordPress org.

Simon Kraft: Or if you're WordCamp organizer or something, yes.

Patricia Brun Torre: Exactly.

Simon Kraft: I mean, there's a batch for Meetup organizer as well for some time now. But I think having that added to your profile is a manual process. At least I remember that from a couple of years ago, you had to fill out like some Google spreadsheet and then someone comes in there at night and adds a little batch to your profile.

Patricia Brun Torre: So this would be totally integrated, you know, so that would list the event you attended, the event you organized when you publish. There is a new event and also listed, obviously, from, of course, on event.wepress.org and in the website dashboards. Because at least the people who do not want to sign up for meetup.com, they would then sign up if they don't already have an account on wordpress.org. They would sign up here. It could even bring more contributors to the project.

Simon Kraft: And it would make .org a true one-stop shop for all things WordPress project.

Patricia Brun Torre: Exactly. And also it's a plugin made by the community for the community. This is how Mike already described it. And it's open source for the love of open source, you know, so.

Simon Kraft: So let's reiterate on that. GatherPress is a plugin. It's supposed to, in its final form, be used on the WordPress org multisites or on the events WordPress org. And it's intended to be like a central hub for all the meetups, similar to what meetup.com right now is for WordPress meetups. Could I run one of those instances myself? I guess I could because it's an open source plugin, right?

Patricia Brun Torre: Yes, you can. Yeah, you can find it for now on GitHub and soon on the plugin repository. And you can totally install it on a standalone site and run your own events. Living on the edge, you know.

Simon Kraft: That's the only way to do it. Say I am a meetup organ, which I mean, that's true. I'm a meetup organizer, but let's pretend I was a meetup organizer. I know the pilot program is not on track yet. So that's not started. Can I just raise my hand for that and take part if and when that happens?

Patricia Brun Torre: So the pilot program is going to be run for a few months. And the meetup groups that are interested to take part into the test and the pilot program, I believe we'll be asked to run both in parallel. So you will need to continue on meetup.com as well as using this. You can sign up. I created an issue in the GitHub repository, the GatherPress meetup repository, called groups interested to take part into the pilot program. So you can add your name and your group there. Okay, so any group can say, hello, I'm interested to take part in the pilot program.

Simon Kraft: I know you've published the proposal on Make WordPress All late last year.

Patricia Brun Torre: No, 22nd of January.

Simon Kraft: Okay, it feels like late last year. Late in January. Okay, would it help the project if people would show up there and show their support? I know you already reminded me that I haven't done that myself yet. I will make sure to do so.

Patricia Brun Torre: Yes, and even if we don't agree with the project, it's always good to have all the sites so we know what should be improved, why, yes or no.

Simon Kraft: Especially if people see issues, that would make sense.

Patricia Brun Torre: Whatever you feel, the more comments, the better. And if you want to join the weekly hurdles, just go to gatherpress.org and you will see the weekly hurdles. You can register and everyone is welcome. And if you test the plugin, you can find it for now on github.com slash gatherpress and download the latest version. There is a lot of change currently.

Simon Kraft: Anything else we should cover regarding Gatherpress?

Patricia Brun Torre: Yes, more in a general way. Last year, I participated to a panel called How to Contribute to WordPress Without Knowing How to Code at WordCamp Europe. And at the same time, even I should have known, I was feeling like, what would I have to bring as an added value being a non-developer? But I saw what I could do for them. I talked about translation, documentation, and reaching out to people because my skill is that I know a lot of people. It's very easy for me to talk to people.

Simon Kraft: It's like a superpower, yeah.

Patricia Brun Torre: And make friends at Workcamp Europe. So it was easy for me before to publish the proposal to make a draft and ask people to comment on the draft. So we had a lot of feedback before to publish the proposal. So that was very good. And I also was at the CloudFest Hackathon. And same, as a non-developer, I could bring other skills to the project. You should never feel you are not enough. Even joining a team of devs, you know, It can be scary for non-Devs, but every skill is necessary in development. And that's something we need in the WordPress community. Yeah, all kinds of skills.

Simon Kraft: Well, I guess that's a nice note to end on. Thank you for taking the time.

Patricia Brun Torre: Thank you so much, Simon.

Simon Kraft: And I'm looking forward to where this project is going to lead us. Really curious about that.

Patricia Brun Torre: Thank you for your support.

Simon Kraft: You're welcome.