Introduction
We propose a pilot program to test GatherPress, a community-developed plugin, within interested and active WordPress meetup groups. This initiative stems from our community’s need for an innovative event management tool tailored to the unique demands of WordPress event organizers and participants.
The pilot program would be held in real-world conditions with WordPress Meetup groups.
We have expressed commitments to a trial run from New Jersey and Nashville groups in the USA, French-speaking groups in Switzerland, and potential interest from groups in Spain, Japan as well as from learn.wordpress.org.
Overview of GatherPress
GatherPress, led by @mauteri and @hrmervin, is a plugin designed with functionalities akin to Meetup.com, but specifically crafted for the WordPress community by members of the WordPress community. It is the result of the WordPress community’s desire for new event management tools that meet the diverse needs of event organizers and members.
You can find more information on the website and on GitHub.
Documentation pages, including a demo video, are available on the website.
We welcome everyone to comment here, to test GatherPress (also for accessibility) or join the GatherPress weekly huddles, Slack channel or even the team.
Summary of Value Proposition
GatherPress
✅ Members and Attendance data lives on your website and database. Community Organizers define privacy policies, selectively publish attendees lists, gather additional data from attendees, etc.
✅ Democratized access to data and functionality, as WordPress is customizable
✅ Open Source: free, and scaled with WordPress
Meetup and Commercial Apps
❌ Data Ownership, Data Integrity, Data Privacy
❌ Control of Roadmap, Enhancements, and Integrations
❌ Cost and Scale
❌ Control UX and accessibility
Pilot Program Objectives
Real-World Testing
The pilot aims to test GatherPress in a live environment, providing practical insights into its functionality and user experience feedback.
Community engagement
Engage with the participating meetup groups from the international community.
Feedback & Analysis
Collect feedback from both organizers and participants throughout the course of their use of GatherPress during the trial.
Analyse suggestions, feedback, and bug reports to refine the application into its next version(s).
Reports
Periodic summary posts on how the program is working for the whole community to know about it.
Future Planning
Following the completion of the trial, set the public roadmap of functionality and integrations to be released. Ultimately, the objective of GatherPress is to potentially replace Meetup.com as the centerpoint of the WordPress Community Events and Dashboard Widget source data.
Benefits of the Proposal
1. Community-centric development
This pilot and this project, empowers the WordPress community by directly leading the development process of a tool designed by and for the community at large.
A major challenge of the community is influence over the roadmap of commercially available tools, to build features and functionality needed by organizers, participants, and users with accessibility needs.
2. Enhanced Event Management
GatherPress promises to offer a more integrated and seamless event management experience within the WordPress ecosystem. Among our goals are to allow community organizers to gather data from attendees unique to each hosted event as needed. Additional capabilities are present for triggering additional reminders, customized waitlist workflows, and selectively publishing attendees lists. The GatherPress plugin is built to be extendable and configurable. Companion plugins will be able to seamlessly integrate with the core plugin. GatherPress will also be built to leverage features of other community-based plugins (like BuddyPress).
3. Cost-Effectiveness
This project has the potential to reduce the community’s reliance on external platforms like Meetup.com. The estimated cost savings of leveraging our own application is approx $ 215,000 USD per year, coupled with the full control over event management tools and ownership of our community’s data. WPCS pays Meetup.com $24.50 per group per month (inclusive of a 30% discount). There were 734 groups as of October of 2023.
4. Use-Case Specific Testing
An example of how this testing can grant case-by-case capabilities includes Localization (translated language). By opening the pilot program to groups from various countries, we ensure that the tool is adaptable and functional in a multilingual context, essential for the diverse WordPress community. Furthermore, communities will benefit from the open source nature of the application, enabling customization of RSVP and onboarding workflows.
5. Data Liberation
The WordPress Open Source community is indeed large, and our data is valuable, as is the privacy. GatherPress hosted by WordPress community proper, will enable organizers and leadership to 1) own the community’s data, and 2) make it selectively available for analysis. Insights learned from our community at large, will inform growth opportunities and strategic initiatives into the future. Today, WordPress operates the Data Liberation project, enabling users of commercial tools to migrate into a WordPress experience. You can learn more about the Data Liberation project at: https://wordpress.org/data-liberation/.
6. Meetup.com Importer
One of the first companion plugins the GatherPress team is currently working on is the ability to import meetup.com data to a GatherPress-powered WordPress site. This will make the transition from meetup.com to GatherPress as seamless as possible and simplify managing both as a group transitions from one platform to another.
Next steps
The ideal setup for the pilot is to run GatherPress on a multisite within the wordpress.org network, in collaboration with # meta–wordcamp, # community-events, # meta, and # learn. This approach ensures seamless integration and alignment with the existing WordPress infrastructure, potentially allowing other meetup groups to join and already be in the definitive environment if the pilot program is successful.
Alongside this trial, meetup groups should continue to leverage Meetup.com in parallel to GatherPress.
Timeframe
We are prepared to commence immediately and suggest a minimum of a 6 month duration to meet our pilot’s objectives.
Conclusion
This pilot program presents a unique opportunity to shape the future of event management in the WordPress community. By leveraging the collective knowledge and experience of our meetup groups, we can ensure that GatherPress evolves into a tool that truly resonates with the needs and expectations of our global community.
This proposal has been written by @patricia70 and @hrmervin and reviewed by @mauteri.
Suggestions, edition and additional information (thank you): @annebovelett, @devinmaeztri, @harishanker, @harmonyromo, @iandunn, @isvictorious, @javiercasares, @kcristiano, @nao, @peiraisotta, @unintended8, @_dorsvenabili
The draft was submitted for feedback to other community members as well, the above list only includes the persons who commented.