GatherPress was featured in the latest episode of WPBuilds’ “This Week in WordPress.” Host Nathan Wrigley and co-hosts/guests Wendie, Kathy and Rob discussed our proposal and the benefits of using GatherPress over Meetup.com.

They note that GatherPress offers enhanced customization options and better privacy controls, tailored specifically for the WordPress community.

Nathan and Wendie emphasized the potential cost savings and the importance of having a WordPress-powered alternative for event management, reflecting on the high annual expenses currently spent on Meetup.com by the WordPress community.

You can read the transcript below.

Watch

From 32’57” to 39’58”

Transcript

32:56
okay here we are here we are I said it would be coming and it was the next item on the list so
33:04
Patricia who’s in the in the comments that’s nice nice when you get to have somebody in the comments about something they’ve written. This is a proposal
33:11
which Patricia has written off the back of a plugin project it’s bigger than a
33:17
plugin really and it is really revolving around the whole Meetup thing
33:23
now if you if you’re attendee of WordPress events like WordPress Meetups you’ll have run into Meetup the
33:30
platform Meetup.com and typically if you want to run a
33:36
WordPress event you have to go through the Meetup platform now as an end user
33:42
that is to say I show up to events I’ve never run an event so I’ve never had to administer the back end but Tim
33:49
who’s in the comments Tim Nash was in the other week and I know a variety of people who do organize it the universal
33:55
opinion seems to be that Meetup is not great can I encapsulate it like
34:01
that Wendie it’s not great enough or does it need to go do I need to be more strong with my
34:07
language no agreed it’s fine okay so it’s limited it has it does what it
34:15
needs to do it doesn’t have for example you can’t style your text you can’t
34:21
there is only you can only add one image yeah the the basic functionality
34:27
works pretty well actually you can create an event and people can sign up which is what it’s supposed to do but
34:32
it’s not to everybody’s liking and a lot of people seem to dislike it well wouldn’t it be great if there was some
34:38
sort of I don’t know let’s call it a Content management system which could which could power an altern- oh wait
34:46
there is and it’s called WordPress and there’s a plugin which has been put together by and I’m going to read it off
34:53
my piece of paper Mike Auteri and I suspect there’s other people involved
34:58
in the background but I’m just going to mention Mike’s name I did a podcast episode with him which will be coming out on Wednesday all about is very
35:05
Patricia is very involved in this too oh is she okay so Piccia as well (note: Nathan misunderstood Piccia for Patricia) that’s great there’s probably a listed names isn’t there
35:12
little bit further down but this is something called GatherPress and it’s basically a WordPress swap out for Meetup
35:20
now the the intention really over the over the next period of time is to test it out and if if I remember
35:27
what Mike said correctly the idea is to get people who are running events to do the event in parallel so have it running
35:34
on Meetup but at the same time run it on GatherPress and see how it works and
35:40
sort of move this project forward and then have a decentralized kind of
35:45
federated maybe at some point so all of the instances can join together you might just have one login instead of
35:50
need to log in into the I don’t know Phoenix or Brighton or Bristol or London Meetup website and so the pilot
35:57
program needs your help it really looks like a mature project so here’s the
36:04
benefit is the pros and the cons the benefits are members and attendees data lives on your website and database
36:11
Community organizers define privacy policies selectively publish attendee list gather additional data from
36:17
attendees etc uh it Fosters democratize access to data and
36:23
functionality as WordPress is customizable it’s open source and you could add a whole bunch of other things
36:29
to that couldn’t you you know you could extend the platform yourself if you felt that there was some need for your particular event you can style it as
36:36
as Wendie just said and they are looking for your help I will put a link to the show notes but you can see the page
36:42
there Patricia’s page proposal pilot program to test GatherPress on wordpress.org network as a Meetup
36:49
alternative so there we go Patricia yeah I’m definitely going to sign up for the Meetup that I do in my city
36:57
every month so yeah and run it in parallel yep yeah yeah just see how it works and see how it goes and contribute
37:03
to moving away from Meetup into a more open source alternative I think maybe
37:10
would be great yeah I think throwing into the mix here would be the fact that Meetup was current just very recently
37:15
like I don’t know 10 days ago or something it was announced that it had been acquired by a company called
37:21
Bending Spoons uh who were behind a bunch of SAAS projects they also acquired
37:26
Evernote recently and maybe there’s maybe there’s some alarm bells there like you don’t know what’s going to happen you
37:32
know will it just sort of sit and gather dust and if it’s not profitable they’ll junk it I don’t know but there’s that in
37:38
the mix as well so Kathy and Rob talk for too long sorry anything on
37:45
not well I I think Rob was mentioning before that ever since we work I believe
37:52
that yeah we we yeah ever since then Meetup has just kind of
37:58
been we sort of wondered about the long-term viability of it and so
38:04
because of that I’m really happy to see that we’re developing some of our own solutions for our community and I think that could help
38:11
other communities as well so it’s very exciting to see yeah Rob I think it’s why
38:18
aren’t we again developing these solutions in WordPress so it’s the old
38:24
why you use WooCommerce and not Shopify why do you use Groundhog and not Convert Kit
38:29
you know that type of solution and we have an open source and we’re democratizing publishing so this is
38:35
ideal just to bring back in house and develop a solution right inside WordPress to do it so well done I think um I
38:43
think I haven’t really paraphrased what Mike said he he really came across as a very thoughtful person and he there has
38:51
been a lot of thought for a long long time behind this and I think they’ve
38:56
got to the point now where they think they’ve got something ready to go but you can listen to his thoughts on why he
39:03
he would like this to become a thing inside a WordPress it really does seem like a proper Community endeavor
39:10
I didn’t you know he told me the number of dollars that are spent every
39:18
year on Meetup and I can’t remember what it was but I think it was I’m gonna I’m very close when I say this I think
39:25
it’s 234,000 go from the the Foundation I
39:31
don’t know actually where the money comes from but in some way WordPress the Community at large pay
39:37
$234,000 to Meetup every year and um you know we have the CMS that could
39:43
power this to be done for our own incentives so yeah okay there we go
39:50
right okay let’s move on shall we nothing else to add about that imagine all the things we could do with that money for the greater good