GatherPress was recently featured on the StellarWP podcast, “WP Constellations”! Hosts Michelle Frechette and Erica Eide had an in-depth discussion with Mike Auteri and Patricia BT about the GatherPress project and its potential to transform how WordPress events are managed.

Key Highlights:

• Community-Driven: GatherPress is designed as a community plugin, where the WordPress community has a voice in its development and roadmap, similar to BuddyPress.
• Open Source Alternative: Unlike Meetup.com, GatherPress is an open-source platform that allows full control over data and customization, aligning with the open-source ethos of WordPress.
• Cost Savings: The podcast highlighted the high annual costs of using Meetup.com and discussed how GatherPress could save significant expenses for the WordPress community.
• Integration: Future plans include better integration with the WordPress network, making it easier for event organizers to manage events directly within a dedicated WordPress site for their group.

To hear the full conversation and learn more about GatherPress, listen to the episode here: StellarWP’s WP Constellations Podcast Episode 19.

Watch

You can also watch it or listen to the audio only, on StellarWP’s WP Constellations Podcast Episode 19.

Transcript

(copied from WPConstellations)

[00:00:02] Michelle: Welcome to WP Constellations, a podcast exploration of the WordPress universe, brought to you by StellarWP.

Welcome to WP Constellations. It’s a Stellar exploration of the WordPress universe. I try to say that every time. I mess it up every time, but today I got it right. So I’m here with StellarWP and this is our podcast, WP Constellations, where we talk about things at Stellar, but we also talk about things that are happening in the community and other projects and plugins that are and, you know, just other stuff in the WordPress community. I love the word stuff. It’s just so. Yeah, whatever. Anyway, I am so fortunate to have different co-hosts from within StellarWP today. My co host is Erica Eede. Erika, how are you?

[00:00:53] Erica: I’m great, thanks, Michelle. Thanks for having me.

[00:00:55] Michelle: My pleasure. And you are in customer support for The Events Calendar, is that correct?

[00:01:00] Erica: Yep. I’m a tier one agent, so I handle, you know, basic questions and point people to knowledge base articles and just help them use our plugins better.

[00:01:10] Michelle: I love that. Thank you for all that you do. Erica and I have little side chats happening all the time. Like, hey, how are you?

She has at least one… Do you have one or two hairless cats? I know you have at least one.

[00:01:22] Erica: I have one hairless cat and one wavy haired cat.

[00:01:27] Michelle: There you go. So it’s fun to watch those pictures. 

Our guests today are Mike Auteri and Patricia BT with a new product that’s coming out into WordPress that’s actually community project called GatherPress. And I have been kind of on the inside knowledge a little bit, talking to y’all about this a little on the outside, but I’m super excited about it. So I would like to welcome you both to the show and I’m going to ask you to kind of just introduce yourselves.

Where are you located in the world, what you do with WordPress aside from GatherPress? Because we’re going to jump into that in a minute, but I’m going to go ahead and start with Mike because you’re unmuted. So you first.

[00:02:07] Mike: Sure. Thanks, Michelle.

Thanks for having us. My name is Mike Auteri. I am a director of engineering at Penske Media Corporation.

We’re a large publisher. We own Rolling Stone, Variety, Deadline, IndieWire in probably about 20 or so other brands you may know, or probably know.

I’ve been in the WordPress space since 2008 and I would say professionally starting in like 2012, working in enterprise WordPress.

[00:02:36] Michelle: That’s very cool. And I have met you in New Jersey.

[00:02:39] Mike: Yes. I’m in New Jersey, too. Yes. New Jersey, yes. And I run the Montclair meetup in New Jersey and WordCamp.

[00:02:46] Michelle: And I have seen you at those WordCamps the last two years, so it’s nice to see you again. Patricia. Tell us a little bit about you.

[00:02:52] Patricia: Yes. Hello. My name is Patricia. I live in Geneva in the French speaking part of Switzerland. I run the meetup in Geneva, and we co-organize all the Swiss WordCamps with my friends from other cities of Switzerland.

I think Switzerland is about the size of one of your states, so we have one WordCamp a year in our country.

Besides organizing meetups and WordCamps in Switzerland, I’m also this year co-organizer for WordCamp Europe, and I contribute to the community team.

I’m going to take part in the mentorship program, the upcoming one, and I also try to attend the meetings for the Sustainability Team and the DEIB working group.

[00:03:42] Michelle: And I have seen you in that one before, myself. Very good. It’s nice to have you both here.

[00:03:49] Patricia: Thank you.

[00:03:51] Michelle: I’m going to turn it over to Erica.

You’re muted, though. I do it all the time.

[00:03:59] Erica: Sorry about that first time here. So, what is GatherPress, and how is it different from other calendar plugins?

[00:04:10] Mike: So it is probably more in line with Meetup. So, when we went about this, we were looking for a better open source alternative to Meetup.

One of our big ideas right from the get go was a community plugin. So when I set off looking to build something like this, I wanted a plugin where the WordPress community had a voice of the roadmap of what a plugin like this will do. So it doesn’t have any other thoughts of, like, a freemium model or anything to that effect. It is kind of more in line with something like BuddyPress or something to that and something in that regard where the plugin itself is driven by the community. So that is kind of the big thought of, like, why we went with something right from scratch rather than something that’s already off the shelf.

[00:05:15] Michelle: That makes sense. And you have a nice, large team. It’s not just the two of you working on this. I didn’t tell you I was going to ask this, but tell us a little bit about how you grew the team to create GatherPress.

[00:05:29] Mike: So, GatherPress has been around in some inception for about four years. So the idea came about five years ago. I was driving to WordCamp US in 2018, which was a 14 hours drive because I was going from New Jersey to Tennessee. I did that with my other WordPress organizer, Cameron Barrett. So in the car, we were talking about the idea. At that point, the dashboard widget was already in WordPress core. So the thought was like, meetup still helps, but this is the opportunity. If we were to pull away from Meetup, even just a little bit, this is the time we can do it, because we’re able to promote meetups within WordPress like on the dashboard itself. And that was a big, big thing that came out. And we noticed our numbers going up from that dashboard widget. And this is all anecdotal, but when I was asking people that were attending the meetup, where did you find us? They’re like, we saw it on the dashboard widget. You’re a mile away. And I just inherited this WordPress site, and I have no idea what I’m doing. This seemed very serendipitous. So with those kinds of conversations we had in the past, it seemed like a good idea, and it seemed like a conversation we could have for 14 hours. So about a year later, I kind of, I kind of kicked off the project just in GitHub, just started putting some things together. And through the course of WordCamps and meetups, just telling people about it, we started attracting other folks. And the more and more, the mature, the more mature the project got with us demoing it, the more people were interested in it, because it looked like a thing. At this point, it wasn’t just a concept.

[00:07:21] Michelle: That’s awesome. And how many people are working on it now? I know you’ve got your own slack channel because I lurk there.

[00:07:28] Mike: We have a lot of people in there, I would say.

Patricia, how many would you say are actively working on? Probably like about ten-ish. About ten.

Varying levels of people come and go. That’s just how projects work. I would say probably five or six are kind of really there.

Almost every meeting we have, because we have weekly meetings on Fridays at 11:00 a.m. I think I’ve told you about that. You attended one of them.

[00:07:59] Michelle: I’ve been to one, yes. When it works out on my schedule.

[00:08:02] Mike: 11:00 a.m. Eastern time every Friday.

GatherPress.org. You can find them there.

[00:08:09] Michelle: Anybody can.

[00:08:12] Mike: It’s powered by GatherPress too. It better be using it.

[00:08:17] Michelle: I love it. So I’m always interested when I see new community projects that are being created specifically for the WordPress community, especially when it’s something that kind of unites us. Like, think about Marcus Burnette’s The WP World. That he launched last year, something that brings people together. Right. And I love the fact that like my WP Speakers is represented in The WP world, that he has events like we’ve, we’ve growing these things outside of, you know, necessarily WordPress.org kind of thing.

GatherPress has the potential, like you said, to work in place of Meetup. So you talked to us a little bit about like coming up with the idea, but what is the impetus of replacing Meetup specifically?

[00:09:01] Mike: So the way we kind of see it is, I’ll let Patricia take this a little bit. She put together the proposal. Are you okay with chatting a little bit about that, Patricia?

[00:09:13] Patricia: Yeah, there are a few things to say about that. The first thing is that we are an open source community and Meetup.com is a proprietary platform. So this is the first thing. And some of the people who came to our meetup, they were surprised because they had to register to yet another place. They thought it’s WordPress, they thought they would arrive on maybe WordPress.org on our WordPress site. And no, they said, why did I have to go register on that Meetup thing that I didn’t know about?

I know that there is the discoverability thing, which might be a little bit less in Europe and other places. I don’t know.

It’s just that for us it’s strange that there is no open source and that the data is not controlled by WordPress.org actually, because we are, I think, 500,000 members in all groups around the world that you can see in events.WordPress.org. And those 500,000 people’s data are on a proprietary platform which has just been acquired by Bending Spoons. So we don’t know. I know that they work closely with the community team.

There is a big contract because WordPress community support, WPCS pays more than $200,000 per year for that, for all the groups. And yes, it’s, we are a good client of them. So they try to do good, they listen, they improve their platform. There was at some point some accessibility issues they try to improve, but even if they build it to perfection, it would still be a proprietary platform with the data not in the hands of the WordPress network.

[00:11:21] Michelle: And it’s expensive for WordPress, isn’t it?

[00:11:25] Patricia: We had an information that is the most expensive.

Yeah. It’s the highest expense for WPCS. Yes.

[00:11:33] Michelle: That’s amazing.

[00:11:35] Mike: Just about $215,000 a year. WordPress page meetups.

[00:11:40] Michelle: Amazing.

[00:11:41] Mike: Yeah. 734 groups. It’s like 2450 a month times twelve. Do the math, it’s a lot.

[00:11:50] Michelle: And there are groups right now that are not official chapters of WordPress on Meetup. Would this also solve the problem for some of them who don’t want to be owned, so to speak? I don’t know the better word, but would this make them independent from that?

[00:12:05] Mike: Yeah, so, you know, we have a grand scheme of, or not scheme of, grand idea of what we’d love to see.

But first things first, it’s an open source project. So I’ll use Patricia for an example her friend in Switzerland has a choir, and instead of going to Meetup.com, she is now using GatherPress on her WordPress site to reach out to the folks that are in that choir.

Same thing for the WordPress community that wants to just self host, much like anything with WordPress. You can install it and use it however you like. It’s, you know, it’s free, but yeah. So the idea though is within our proposal that we would love to see something built into the WordPress network. So when we look at official WordPress meetups, we can kind of see them in the same, like, I kind of envision the same regard as WordCamps, how that’s on like a large multisite, you use your WordPress profile to log in.

It can work with everything in the WordPress network there. And I think that that’s a huge opportunity for us.

[00:13:30] Michelle: WordPress.org now has events.WordPress.org. Would this be able to feed back into that in the same way that Meetup.com does now?

[00:13:39] Mike: That’s the idea. And that does take some coordination with the core team, the meta team, et cetera, getting those into the API that that uses in order to, instead of using Meetup, using this.

But much like WordCamps are in there too. So that API already works with stuff in the WordPress infrastructure. So it would just be building something like that in there and knowing which groups are in what thing, I guess is really going to be part of the challenge. But that’s also the fun part, like connecting all the things.

[00:14:22] Michelle: Absolutely.

[00:14:23] Erica: So Patricia, you addressed this a little bit in the last part, but part of what makes Meetup desirable is discoverability within a larger community. People looking for groups XYZ near them. And how do you see that being replaced with GatherPress?

[00:14:42] Patricia: I think it was a huge part of the success of meetups some years ago in the beginning, but now I will take the example. In my city we have like 800 people registered in the meetup and I have never seen them actually like maybe 750. I never seen them. Or maybe once like five years ago. And all the new people are not coming from that. It’s mostly from the dashboard or when we advertise on, we promote our meetup on social networks so they arrive, and then if they are not in the group, they have to register to Meetup. But most of them didn’t, I think in the recent years, didn’t discover from that. But as I said, it might be a bit different in other parts of the world because I saw some traffic statistics that 60% of Meetup visitors are from the US.

And for example, in my country on Meetup, it’s mostly the international people working on. We have a lot of international people in Geneva working for international organizations and their family. Most of the meetings and meetups are in English. It’s not really used by the local a little bit, but not that much coming to our meetup. And on the opposite, if people who are new to WordPress arrive and instead to be forced to register on Meetup.com, they would have to register on WordPress.org, which is very good even to find new contributors. And for discoverability, I think if WPCS saves this big amount of money, that could be reinvested in some outreach and paid marketing, I don’t know.

[00:16:40] Mike: So yeah, I have a few thoughts on that too. So I don’t see us fully pulling ourselves out of Meetup. That’s not kind of the intention. I see a smaller footprint on Meetup, if you think about it. We have 734 groups right now, and a lot of them are, some of them are in close proximity that they could probably work off of one meetup group that doesn’t take any rsvps and really directs the traffic over to the WordPress network.

And so having just a smaller footprint could save us a bunch of money. And also the discoverability within WordPress. Because we talk about the discoverability of meet, like, you know, of discovering meetup groups. But given that meetups are completely separated from the rest of the WordPress infrastructure, we lose a lot of discoverability within. Like they just see kind of the, they don’t see like how deep the WordPress community goes by being on the outskirts of the meetup. If you drive them right into the WordPress network, from beginning, they start discovering, learn.WordPress.org. They learn about all the WordCamps. We’re able to point data that is relevant to people when they get onto a network like that, much better than we can on Meetup, which we can’t I can’t even tell you how many times we have a WordCamp. And I have, like, I have to tell people we have a WordCamp, like face to face. They’re like, oh, you have a WordCamp? I’m like, yeah, we’ve had it for five years. And they’re like, I had no idea. They’ve been going to the Meetup for a couple times. There’s no discoverability within the deeper pieces of WordPress, even location wise, because there’s no way for us to really promote it on Meetup. We have to do it in other ways.

[00:18:40] Michelle: So, yeah, so that was one of my first questions to you, Mike. When you reached out to me in DM’s on Twitter, I think it was at least it was still Twitter back then.

And my biggest question was, well, how are people going to find it if it’s sitting on all these websites? And so you were like, you kind of talked about some of the things that you and Patricia have talked about already. And I wanted to tell you that it’s not that I didn’t believe you, but I wanted to experience some data for myself. And it’s unscientific because I literally just posted a poll in my local group’s Facebook group, and I’m like, how did you learn about our meetup group? And I gave options, like, from a friend on the dashboard or on Meetup.com itself. And I think, I don’t know. I had less than 20 people respond, so hence “the not scientific.” However, almost every single one of them said either from a friend or on the dashboard. So I was like, okay, so they’re really not discovering WordPress on Meetup.com. So that concern that I had was like, okay, I’m not concerned about that anymore.

[00:19:41] Mike: So I have more concerns about spam coming from Meetup because I, like, you know, when someone logs, you know, comes in or signs up, especially on the day I go invest, like, if they have, like, a, something that looks like it could be a spam account by some means, I look at it and, like, a thousand other Meetup groups, you know, they’re just on Meetup just going to things and trying to sign up and troll or something to that effect. So, yeah, you know, that’s, I feel how Meetup discoverability is now.

[00:20:17] Michelle: Well, and I’ve been DMed through Meetup for like, hey, are you single? That kind of stuff. Yeah, you know, every single group of singles groups, all of the groups I’ve been in have also had, like, advertising for, like, everything from illegal drugs to other, you know, hey, I will build your website for free kind of stuff. Right. So I think it could definitely cut down on some of that spam that comes through.

[00:20:42] Mike: Yeah, for sure.

[00:20:44] Michelle: So every entrepreneur that I know, including myself in the past, even when they’re still building phase one, is thinking down the roadmap to what? Phase three, what does growth look like? How can we grow this to be, um, if it’s not monetization, which I don’t think is what you’re looking for here, it’s open source, but, but so even when it’s not monetization though, it’s like what could it grow to? How could it be better? How can we incorporate more things? So what is on, like what does your ideal roadmap look like? I’m not asking you to promise anything today just to get that out of the way, but like, what are some things you’d like to see grow? What’s the direction you want to see some things?

[00:21:20] Mike: I have my ideas, but I want to hear Patricia first. I want to know what her thoughts are because she’s pretty new to the project, so she only joined us in December.

[00:21:27] Patricia: So, yes, so of course Mike will tell you about it, but just the pilot program is for that. If there is a pilot program and some small amount of group joins the pilot program, so then we’ll get feedback and fit your request now, Mike.

[00:21:47] Mike: Sure. So my long term is, yeah, that having that multisite being able to tie everything together, we have a whole backlog of things that we want to see that are still missing in the MVP of this plugin. I would love to have better integration between things like BuddyPress. I would love to see something like that on that network where you have all the features of BuddyPress and there would be some overlap between what GatherPress offers and what BuddyPress offers. But having, you know, programming GatherPress right, so it leverages the things that BuddyPress does really well and disables what it would do in GatherPress so it looks more integrated.

So we are kind of excited about that. Like long term, you know, even short term stuff, we’re getting, we’re getting started working on a Meetup importer. So anybody that would be, anybody on, anybody that could get an API key from Meetup would be able to go in there and import their old data from Meetup. And since we used Meetup as kind of the example that, you know, Meetup’s been around for, I don’t know, 20 years, almost 20 years, they know the features that at least the bare minimum features, we would need at least what people are expecting. We just try to build them the WordPress way or a little bit better or a little bit with a little bit more insight, knowing what we’ve struggled with and trying to improve there, but using an importer like that. So you just to make things easier on organizers and also making things easier on people attending, we want to try to reduce friction wherever where we can. That’s what’s going to make the pilot program successful. It’s like how, how much do people want to use it? Is it like do they adapt to it easily? Because we were thoughtful about user interfaces, we were thoughtful about the administration.

So it’s easy for people to put meetups together and just the configurability.

We’re using the block editor, of course, for our plugin. So it’s using the latest, we’re trying to use the latest and greatest that WordPress has to offer.

So we have very modern tools. And also people want to work on it too, because they don’t want to work on something that’s like the old way or the old tech. They want to use the new and shiny stuff and we try to keep up with it.

[00:24:37] Erica: That importer sounds like a great, you know, anything you can do to help people be more efficient is just people like that. That’s awesome.

[00:24:47] Mike: We used The Events Calendar as an example too. Like how has WordPress done this before? So we, so between Meetup, Events Calendar, and a few other different events, there was like a time like anytime I saw an event management, even like, like Godaddy’s event management anything, I’m just like looking at it and I’m just like what are they using? Like what features am I missing?

If I was to pitch this company to use GatherPress rather than what they’re using, what would I need in order for that? Like in order to even get the conversation started, that sort of thing. So looking at every single different event, man, they’re all a little bit different. They all have different ideas of what they consider event management, but looking at all those and making sure that we’re thoughtful of what people are looking for.

[00:25:40] Michelle: So if this is being used by companies, let’s say XYZ hosting company, a lot of hosting companies have their little, I shouldn’t say little, I don’t mean it in a pejorative way. They have group meetings, they have, whether it’s to pitch their thing or they’re just growing community, whatever it is.

How would that, is there a toggle for example, as I guess is what I’m trying to say so that if I create something for WordPress meetup here in Rochester, would show up on the WordPress events that WordPress and maybe on dashboards, as opposed to a company whose commercial endeavors should not show up on those things. So are you accounting for that? I said that poorly, but I hope you got the idea.

[00:26:24] Mike: Yeah. So I think that much like how WordCamps work, so much like all the technology that powers WordCamps, those are all open source, you could create your own, you could create your own WordCamp site. All that stuff’s free right now. Granted there’s some infrastructure behind it that you probably won’t have access to, but for the most part you could build the WordCamp site that would not fall in the API. So essentially what I would see as falling in the API is you would still have to be an official WordPress meetup. And there’s a lot of reasons why we wouldn’t want to promote something that’s not official and problematic organizers, stuff like that, not following the rules, et cetera.

You don’t want to be associated with that for various reasons, branding reasons, legal reasons, et cetera. So anything that’s official would, I would see as built into the WordPress network, so anything in that network would appear in that dashboard widget, not anything outside. So it’s not so much GatherPress at that point. GatherPress is just a thing powering event management. It would be within the WordPress, the meta team to include which sites in that multisite or the sites in that multisite into that API to be available in the dashboard widget.

[00:27:52] Michelle: That makes sense. My brain is always like, I’m not a developer. Y’all know I’m not a developer, but I wonder how they’re going to account for that so other people can use it. How come everybody’s, everything doesn’t show up everywhere? That’s when my lack of development chops rears its ugly head.

[00:28:08] Mike: It might be interesting though, if there were some sort of like API key, if you wanted to stay self hosted, but you were an official meetup, but you don’t want to be in that network. Like having something that would include you in there. I don’t know, there might be security reasons or issues around that, but there’s nothing stopping.

There’s nothing stopping that from happening is what I’m saying. So there are options. It’s more about security than anything because.

[00:28:38] Michelle: I will always bring you questions and not solutions. Mike, that’s okay.

[00:28:43] Mike: You gave something to me to noodle over.

[00:28:47] Michelle: Awesome. Over to you, Erica.

[00:28:51] Erica: Okay, well that was really interesting. Is there anything else you want to share with the audience? Anything we didn’t ask you, we want to talk about within GatherPress or anything?

[00:29:03] Patricia: Yes, just want to clear a misconception that we got, I think on social media, one person said, I’m an organizer, I don’t like the idea because it will, I have limited time and it will be more of a burden if I have to self host. So no. Now I think it’s clear the proposal is to have it in the WordPress.org network infrastructure. That’s difficult in English. And, and working with the meta team, the thing is that you can host yourself beside it, that’s the beauty of it. And you can choose, you can even build on it, create add ons if you want. And I guess the meta team will build add on to make it work. Like you, Michelle, I’m not a developer, so this is, yeah, so it’s easy to be built upon. And also it’s done what I call the WordPress way or the core way because really it looks like when you install it, it looks like it’s part of the core, you know, it’s not like some plugin that have a different look and feel and many stuff to go outside. No, no, it’s really part of it, you know. So I just wanted to add also that, yes, as Mike said, I joined only two months ago because I was actually telling some of the limitations of Meetup and a friend told me, we were discussing in DM and he said maybe, you know, about that project, do you want me to put it in contact with them? And that was October. And I said no, because, you know, there are developers, I’m not, what would be the value I would add to that. But as with everything in the WordPress world, even if you are not a developer, you have a lot to bring. And when in December there was another limitation, I posted something in the Slack channel in the community team and I remembered that previous conversation and then I tagged Mike and he said welcome, welcome to our meeting, anyone can join. And the next one was 90 minutes later. So I joined and I’m so happy I did. And I attended all the meetings since, and just for the international audience, when you say eleven eastern time it’s 04:00 p.m. UTC. 04:00 p.m. UTC every Friday. So anyone can join and yeah, yes, that’s, that’s the thing. And since I joined I, I could do some things about the internationalization to be sure it’s ready to be translated in all the languages that WordPress speaks. Actually, when it will be on the plugin repository, it will also, of course, be available on translate.WordPress.org to be translated by all the amazing polyglots around the world. So also, that’s good. I think it’s soon on the plugin repository. Okay. Yeah, we submitted, it has improved a lot recently about the delay, and they’ve been building the team..

[00:32:32] Michelle: So Patricia, you, I think, are the one who posted on the make WordPress blog about the pilot. And we didn’t talk about this in advance, but tell us just, you know, give us a couple minutes on what the pilot program is. And I was excited to see that it’s not necessarily in the United States and English speaking. So tell a little bit about that.

[00:32:53] Patricia: Yeah, I got help for the English part. I mean, so the thing is that when I joined, all the amazing team members that I met said maybe we would need someone to do that kind of thing. And okay, I know they code, they do everything well and they are a friendly bunch. And I said, okay, this, I can help on that, you know. So I prepared a draft.

I asked for help to correct my English, you know, to be a bit better, to be sure it’s at least readable. And then we sent the draft to a lot of community members that I know. So this also is something that I could bring, you know, all the people I know, and I sent a lot of DMs and say, have a look at that and give us your feedback. And then we built, we brought the final draft before to publish it based on all the feedback we got from a lot of people, you know, so people from the community team, people from training and a lot of feedback. So that was really, really like a treasure to have all the people commenting on the draft. And then when it was ready, it was, I think, the same week that we got the news that Meetup got acquired by an Italian company. So yes, on 22 January, I think I will never forget that date, 22 January.

We published that based on all the feedback and done with the whole team.

[00:34:37] Michelle: And the pilot, though, is not in English speaking groups, though, is that correct? It’s in French speaking groups.

[00:34:43] Patricia: Actually, the pilot program would be in the WordPress.org infrastructure with groups that are willing to participate. So the thing about the French speaking part of Switzerland is we have five groups in my area. And when I talked about that, they were all okay to take part to the pilot program. But then other groups showed their interest, if you see the comments of the proposal.

We have had comments from Spain, someone from Sevilla and Dania. They showed interest. So yes, it’s good that is internationalized and that, yeah, groups show their interest to join the pilot program and then for a few months that would be like a test and maybe be on both platforms with Meetup at the same time. And then we see because it’s a pilot, so it’s to evaluate and take decision later. You know, I love it.

[00:35:51] Michelle: And we will put the link for that blog post on make WordPress in the show notes. So if people are interested in, in learning more about that, we will also have any links we mentioned today will also be in the show notes as well as a transcript of today’s conversation. So anybody listening, just go to stellarwp.com/podcasts and find this episode to find all of those links, including we’re going to put post your social links and everything too. But speaking of your social links and everything too, how do people find out more? Not just about GatherPress, but maybe if you have your own social links as well. Well, if people have questions, if they want to learn more, if they want to be part of the pilot, etcetera, how do we do that?

[00:36:33] Patricia: Mike?

[00:36:34] Mike: Sure. So for GatherPress, it would just be GatherPress.org is probably the hub where you could find everything. You’ll find our GitHub, which is GitHub.com/GatherPress/gatherpress.

You could also find us on X or Twitter, whatever we want to call it these days. That is just GatherPress.

My Twitter is also MAuteri, my LinkedIn is also M Auteri. So you can find me there. And those are probably, I don’t even really go on Twitter. I just kind of lurk and I find myself even lurking less there. So yeah, awesome.

[00:37:15] Michelle: And Patricia, for you.

[00:37:17] Patricia: Yeah. So on my website, PatriciaBT.com, I have five pages specific to what I do with WordPress. So it’s PatriciaBT.com/WordPress. And you will find also a contact page. And there is a lot, way too much actually social links where you can find all my profiles. I did some tests to post everywhere recently to see, to have some data about it. So yeah, all the social links as well as my project, professional project, because I’m self employed.

So also my professional project, I’m soon launching a membership site to show people how to do it by themselves. And not only about WordPress, but also like social media, email marketing, AI and stuff like that.

So everything is listed there on my personal website.

[00:38:25] Michelle: Perfect. And Erica, how do people find you on social if they’re interested in following you.

[00:38:33] Erica: I have an x. Let’s see.

I would say just  EricaEide.com is my I have a little freelance business that I do, but not as active anymore, but yeah.

[00:38:49] Michelle: Awesome. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, everybody. Erica, thank you for co-hosting with me today. And Mike and Patricia, thank you so much for joining us today to talk about GatherPress. I’m excited to help spread the word and see how exciting and the growth is gonna be over the next year or two. So thank you so much for joining us to share today. Appreciate it.

[00:39:10] Mike: Thank you for having us, Michelle, we really appreciate it. And all the help you’ve done for us so far.

[00:39:16] Michelle: My pleasure. Sorry I can’t make every Friday meeting, but I come when I can.

[00:39:19] Mike: That’s okay. We’ll see you soon.

[00:39:22] Michelle: Sounds good. And everybody else, thanks for listening in. We’ll see you on the next episode of WP Constellations.

WP Constellations is a production of StellarWP, home of The Events Calendar, LearnDash, GiveWP, Kadence, Iconic, SolidWP, Orderable, and Restrict Content Pro. Learn more about the StellarVerse at StellarWP.com.