GatherPress was featured again on WPBuilds’ “This Week in WordPress.” Hosts Nathan Wrigley and co-hosts/guest Colin, Michelle and Marc discussed GatherPress for a full 20 minutes, highlighting its potential to replace Meetup.com for organizing WordPress events.

Nathan recapped his conversation with Mike Auteri and how GatherPress began in 2019, developed by Mike and a growing community team. Marc says how much he loves this idea! They discussed pros and cons.

You can read the transcript below.

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From 21’57” to 41’05”

Transcript

okay so this is this is absolutely
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fascinating and we mentioned this on a previous episode but I I wanted to highlight it again a because we’ve got a different panel and B because I’ve
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actually produced the piece of content that it was related to so Michelle
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the co-host of the this weekend WordPress show I’m just gonna keep saying it Michelle she put me in
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touch with somebody called Mike Auteri and uh we had a really interesting chat about a plugin that he and a growing
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team of community members are getting involved in and it’s called some it’s called GatherPress now if you
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have attended a WordPress Meetup or or any event that probably wasn’t a WordCamp
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then you’ve probably come across something called meetup.com it’s a SAAS platform and for historical reasons
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which I don’t really know it has become the de facto way of organizing and
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communicating with people about your events so you know for example the
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WordPress London Meetup which is restarting thank you Dan Maby and Paul Smart the event system that you
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going to go through is Meetup.com however Mike had this intuition that wouldn’t it be nice given that we’ve got a CMS
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wouldn’t it be nice to take this functionality into a plugin so in 2019 and then through the years of the
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pandemic Mike started working on this and and has now got to the point where he thinks it’s pretty much capable of
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doing the job that Meetup would do and so he’s put it out there he’s put it out there for public consumption
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there’s a GitHub repo actually everything’s linked to in the show notes this is on the the WPTavern website I
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put the podcast there and you can find The GatherPress uh slack group you
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can find the the Twitter Channel you can find all of the different pieces the plugin website the GitHub repository
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they’re all in the show notes but he’s really keen to take this forward and to go into a stage where it’s being battle
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tested out in the wild with with real events and seeing what feature set is needed but I just thought this was kind
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of interesting it was recently acquired Meetup.com by a company which
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governs a bunch of SAAS products and so maybe there’s a bit of sweet timing here in that you know questions often get
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asked don’t they when there’s an acquisition how will that keep going and also according to Mike’s calculations
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the WordPress Community spend close to a quarter of a million dollars a year on accounts for
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Meetup I think it was $234,000 a year if his math was correct
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and he thought maybe that could be you know used in some other vein so whether you’ve got a grudge against meetup.com
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or not I’m going to open it up to the panel just go for it what do you think good idea got legs no way who
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knows my biggest concern with it when I so Mike reached out to me a long time ago to see if I’d be willing to look at
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it and give some feedback and some ideas and my biggest concern with it was how
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many people are discovering their local WordPress meetups specifically through
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meetup.com so I ran a very unscientific poll on my
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meetup group and asked them how did you discover this group and of the people
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who answered less than 20 so again not scientific but still gives you some
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anecdotal information I think only one out of 20 had discovered the group
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through meetup.com everybody else had discovered it either through the Facebook group or they had been
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invited from another per through another person and that was the primary way is somebody told me about it several people
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had seen it on their dashboard so you will see local events show up on your
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WordPress dashboard and several people had found it that way so as long as we’re able to continue to put like the
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local Meetups on the dashboard regardless of whether they’re part of meetup.com or not and I suspect that
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events.wordpress.org can somehow feed into there right for your local I don’t
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not sure how that works I’m not a developer but I think that this should be a really good alternative and can
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save groups a lot of money so every official WordPress Meetup that’s on
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meetup.com is paid for by meetup.com (Note, meant WordPress.org) there are a lot of unofficial ones in
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that they are not officially sanctioned and paid for by meetup.org (note: meant WordPress.org) they are not talking about
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WordPress so yeah when I say official that’s what I mean yeah there are a lot more that aren’t that are being paid for
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by people like you and me who have started their Meetup and want to have control over the entire thing as opposed
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to co-opt it with with wordpress.org so this would be a way for you to still
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have a lot of autonomy over your group but save wordpress.org a lot of
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money and be able to put it right on your own websites like wprochester.com for example is our local website
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for our Meetup and that’s you know right now everything’s going on meetup.com and then I’m sharing it other places but if
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it was right on the website that would be a lot easier to do Mike in the podcast he he was mentioning that he
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carried out some other anecdotal survey actually I don’t know if he said that but he said that in his experience
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he was able to show that the dashboard widget has become the thing for the
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Meetup which he attends and organizes it really was coming from the dashboard widget and yeah when I go to my
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Meetup account I only visit it to RSVP to something I’ve seen somewhere else
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which is typically the dashboard widget or on social media I go to meetup.com click the black RS you know I don’t know
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what the wording is but you know I want to go to this event button and then I log out and I’m gone and so it’s not
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really doing any of that maybe I’ve switched off notifications maybe I should be getting email but the dashboard widget would be the way to do
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it and I think Mike’s intuition around this project is that if it got some legs
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and it got some buyin from the community it could become an official project at a
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I don’t know meet.wordpress.org domain name a multisite network setup so that
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you’ve got something akin to a single sign on you use your WordPress.org credentials and and it does all of that
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and he’s already built the functionality you know you got to link it up to some SMTP company or what have you but you
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can reply to people that have received an invite but haven’t replied or people who have agreed to attend and it
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automatically creates an attendance page and you know it just does all that heavy lifting really that meetup.com would do
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so the the idea at the moment and Patrica who might be in the comments I don’t know she put a proposal together
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saying let’s run this in tandem like why not just run it with a meetup and GatherPress at the same time and just
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see what the what the missing feature set is so anyway sorry Marc or
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Colin over to you I personally love the idea I I just am I can’t tell
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you how much in love with this idea I am and maybe it’s because I’m toying with the idea of starting a local Meetup
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here I have always gone to meetup.com to look for WordPress meetups and
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other things but mostly WordPress meetups that’s where I go and and
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I’ve always kind of had a kind of this love/hate relationship with meetup.com since 10 years ago or whenever it was
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that I found my first WordPress Meetup but the key as you mentioned
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Nathan is going to be Community wide adoption of this project and I hope that
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it goes somewhere because you know first of all it’s community driven it’s open source it’s
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all the things that WordPress is and and why not include this in there as well
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since meetups are a big part of what grows our community in the first place
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to some extent I can’t quite work out why it doesn’t why a project like this didn’t
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gather you know didn’t occur a decade or more ago because it almost feels like
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going to a SAAS platform is peculiar given given the capabilities of all of
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the people involved in the community it feels it’s like you know nobody’s inventing the wheel here there’s calendars and email and you know a page
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that’s put together with some kind of archive or I don’t know it’s odd I
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find it I think there’s a lot of you know a lot of brain damage it gets in gets into building something like this
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and maybe nobody everybody was like this is so easy to just go on Meetup and and
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honestly you know back when it was you know the the foundation Meetup was adopted by the
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foundation years and years ago and so it just kind of became the de facto standard of how we did things and you
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know if you look at you know one of the other subjects you’re going to be bringing up shortly is this idea of
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different types of events you know there is the this is the way things were traditionally done and now all of a
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sudden I think it’s post pandemic and we’re kind of looking at things and going we have to come up with other ways to do things now and that’s probably
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part of the thinking is okay let’s look at everything we’ve been doing and let’s see if we can make some things better I
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I don’t know I mean that’s my speculation but I kind of like the idea that if if I was running a Meetup like
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let’s say in my part of the world I kind of like the idea that if I had this capability within a within a plugin I
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could then make my page look like how I want it you know just create a pattern
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consuming the data that GatherPress uh brings to bear and then make it look like where I live apart from you know
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not this white black and red generic thing which honestly it’s so
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uninteresting absolutely doesn’t sell anything does it you know it’s not giving anything about the venue or the
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kind of I don’t know I just think I gotta tell you I do have notifications turned on on Meetup and every time I get
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a Meetup notification I just roll my eyes like nine times out of 10 because it’s like this is going to be something
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else I’m not interested in going to right okay so yeah I you know I like
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I said I have a love/hate relationship for it I prefer to do the work and go for looking what I want to I don’t need
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to have all these notifications and suggestions and and like you said the website is not
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compelling Courtney joins us saying I think a decade ago folks looking to
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connect used Meetup more okay okay that’s an interesting point um also the
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WP project uses a few paid services that specialize in what they do okay so there’s connections to for example
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things like Slack and GitHub okay so there’s wheels within wheels there’s cogs in the background that I’m really not that familiar with the
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other the other thing to keep in mind is that there is a level of control that has to happen at the wordPress.org
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level in order to make sure these are all mapped together and that they’re that they are part of the ownership of
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the different groups so they know what’s happening and know what’s going on so I’m a Meetup organizer I you know take
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the time to go put things out on meetup.com and then I share it and I do and I and whether you like the
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notifications or not Marc a lot of our members remember to put to come to and we meet at the same time every month
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first Monday of every month 6:30 but that’s what reminds people to actually join the Meetup or to which is why I
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have them turned on in the first place is exactly yeah yeah so it’s like you know I
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have to take all the other stuff in order to get to the stuff I want but you know as a community team member because
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I am on the community team as well and I was part of the re I can’t remember what we called it but the re re I
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can’t think of words re-energizing of meetups post pandemic is that we
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were able to like I’m a super user for WordPress on meetups so I can go in
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and look at all of the different meetups and I can you know message people through there how is your Meetup going
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are you ready to get things up and rolling again so we had that for about a year getting you know reaching out to the different meetup groups to make sure
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that if they wanted to get started again if they didn’t how could we find other people in the organization and so there
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was a lot of work that happened and because it was all Central in one place on meetup.com that was easy for us to
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easier for us to do than if we had to start trying to find all of those different meetups other places so I
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think there’s just a level of trying to make sure that it replicates a lot of those same features so that from the
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top down we’re still able to see everything that happens still able to interact with organizers and if
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organizers fall off or you know stop work you know being part of their meetups that we can still reach out to
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other group members so there’s a lot that needs to go on to make sure that we still as WordPress are supporting and
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helping the different groups all over the world to stay healthy okay that’s a
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really interesting context as well because that puts a completely different spin on it to me I had this idea that it would all just be great to
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go to WordPress plugin because it would just be great to have it inside of WordPress but you’re saying that it
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really had utility especially in that period where it needed the community needed a bit of a
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kickstart because of the because of the nature of the I guess the pyramid structure of the of the permissions
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that you get and what have you and if you’re a super user you you had more power yeah that is interesting okay I
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guess though having said all that that could be built inside a multisite network it could be absolutely it’s just a matter
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of making sure that all of those boxes are checked before we would migrate to something like that so that we don’t
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lose any of what we have now right Colin anything on this
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well I have a soft spot for Meetup you know ah controversy yes no no no no
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not at all I I think obviously with anything like this there’s there’s pros and cons to everything right so I have a
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soft spot because like me Meetup is an OG of the internet you know and so it
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has been around forever and the way that I found my first WordPress
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Meetup was very likely because I was already on Meetup for other things like
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blogging or learning to code when I was younger or whatever it may be
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because there’s other interests so the thing that I think we’d lose from moving
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all of the WordPress events into its own thing I think there’s a lot to gain far
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more to gain than than this one thing but is people that use WordPress are not
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just the people that build WordPress or the people that like to talk about the Community of WordPress or people that uh
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make money on WordPress there are people that knit that use WordPress every day
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there are people that flyfish in amazing rivers throughout the
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world that use WordPress every day and none of them are engaged in the communities that the four of us are
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and so if they’re on Meetup and they’re in a fly fishing group but they need
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help with their website if they happened to see like Michelle had brought out if they happen to see that in the Rochester
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area for her now there’s a Meetup that has to do with the software that she’s using to run her website well then you
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end up going to that and then now you’re you get some help which was huge the WordPress meetups back very early on
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and probably still today I do attend a fair number of them is that someone could go in there and say how do I
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update my blog colors yeah right how do I XYZ right nowadays WordPress is
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incredibly complicated compared to what it was when I started with it so yeah I
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think that there’s some of that you know just the overlapping of these
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different communities that we would lose by it all being so WordPress Centric
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it’d be great interesting yeah you know it’d be great because now you have the ability to bring some of those features
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onto WP builds website now and now it communicates maybe even with the wordpress.org site and if there’s an
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event both of them could be up to date with each other and all of those things would be fantastic and obviously when
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you have control of the source then if a if Meetup has a feature or does not have a feature that someone has been wanting
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for a long time it could easily get done but there is that little bit of an overlap the vend diagram of why someone
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uses WordPress as opposed to the fact that they use WordPress and the reason why they use WordPress is
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probably just to sell their jewelry or whatever it may be whatever their
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interest is um so that’s something I think we would lose and I might shed one tear for Meetup when that
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happens but maybe there’s a way to use the Meetup API too if
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Bending Spoons is you know fine with it maybe there’s a way that these Meetups could still be reflected in the
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Meetup ecosystem so that that still happens if I’m in Phoenix Arizona
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and I look up events that are in my area it would still be really cool if there was something that showed hey there’s
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going to be like 15 people at a coffee shop talking about WordPress on Monday wouldn’t it be you know maybe I’ll pop
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in there because I heard of WordPress or whatever yeah that’s really interesting you put a really different side to it
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and I think I think both you and Michelle have painted a a really credible picture for why it’s not a question of throwing the baby out do you
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use that phrase for throw the baby out with the bath I try not to I was just as soon as I said it
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familiar with it yeah okay but you know you know what I mean you don’t just throw throw good after battle or
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something like that um and there’s a lot of maybe there is a lot more utility in it than I thought um that’s that’s
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fascinating but the idea of yeah I kind of like the idea of it being federated some way around a central
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multide network and let’s say that on WP build I installed that plugin and I could then in some way connect to that
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and advertise my WordPress related events obviously there’d have to be a gatekeeper saying yeah Nathan’s allowed
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but this other thing over there which is nothing to do with WordPress and all the inevitable spam I just kind of like the idea of that but you make a really good
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point if we’re trying to find new people then maybe maybe something based
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upon WordPress is kind of is locking them out because unless they’ve already found their way in they’re going to
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struggle with something that isn’t like Meetup yeah maybe there is something about the API okay thank you for that
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that was that was interesting I enjoyed that that was very compelling Colin I’m rethinking all of it now yeah I think I
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think I’m back have a lie down after this