Building a Community-Driven Meetup Solution

Mike:
So my name is Mike Auteri. I’m a director of engineering at Penske Media Corporation and I’ve been involved with GatherPress for four years, about four years, but we kind of really got serious about it two years ago, I would say is really the first timeline of where things of what GatherPress looks like now is. That was kind of the beginning of where it is. I’m super happy to be here and I’m going to pass it over to Mervin.

Mervin:
Well thanks everyone. My name’s Mervin. I have been a long time community member at WordPress NYC, presently in Nashville, and today I serve as the tech lead at Savage Ventures as well as some other projects I GatherPress among them. And yes, I’ve been with the project, I think just about from its inception. I can remember the conversations early on where you were telling us how you came up with the idea and what the objectives were and all the way through to putting some code on paper. And here we are today, we have an MVP, we have some good next goals and we have a game plan for what we’d like to bring to the community. So yeah, it’s just a fruition of being a member of the community and being involved and looking out for opportunities of how we can apply our open source in many places. So yeah, excited to chat.

Patricia:
I’m Patricia BT from Geneva in the French speaking part of Switzerland. I mostly contribute to the community team by doing different things. I organize the local meetups here in Geneva. I co-organize the WordCamps in Switzerland and this year, I’m also a WordCamp Europe co-organizer and I’m an event supporter previously called WordCamp mentor and I’m taking part in the second cohort of the mentorship project. And finally I try to attend the meetings of the Sustainability team and the DEIB working group. And now Mike, would you like to tell us how it all began?

Mike:
Sure. So I mean we thought about, I’ve heard the idea before, well before we even decided that, hey, this is a good idea, but I think one of the big things to think about is for a long time WordPress was very much needed meetup because that was the only way for discoverability. Once the dashboard widget came out, I think that was really the tipping point of where an idea, this made a lot more sense. I was driving with Cameron. We decided last minute to go to WordCampUS in Nashville and if any of you are familiar or not familiar with the US, New Jersey is very far from Tennessee, so it was a 14 hour drive. So we left in the middle of the night, I think three o’clock in the morning and we take his car and drive that 14 hours just switching off driving. There was a bunch of conversations, but one of the conversations was how much we just didn’t like the meetup platform and for various reasons, I mean it was, I guess fine, it did its work, but especially I think at that time the user interface was all over the place. It kept doing redesigns and couldn’t figure itself out.

I mean, Patricia, you’ve seen it. There’s lots of bugs that just pop up randomly and we have very little control over it. We had a meetup for a long time and we had a WordCamp and there was getting people in our meetup to know that we have a WordCamp was a challenge, which shouldn’t be the case. The things that we have on our meetup site should be able to promote all the other things that great things we do and all the other great meetups that are around us. So we had this conversation and came up with the name GatherPress. Cameron may have actually grabbed the domain while we are at WordCamp. I don’t know. But yeah, that was kind of the beginning of that conversation. That was, I believe December 20. So it was late 2018. We kind of sat on it for a while and then at some point I just created a repo and like, all right, I’m starting on this. And it was almost a year later, so just got the basics together of what this plugin would be. I forget when you joined Mervin, why don’t you tell us a little bit about when you got to the project? I know you got on early, I just don’t remember the exact time.

Mervin:
Yeah, I can just remember you starting the repo and starting to work on it. I don’t know that there was a specific date that I just meshed into it. It was, Hey, I started on this. Let’s have weekly meetings and kind of keep chipping at it. And that’s kind of what we did. And I think I’ve joined probably 75-80% of the meetings early on. We talked about what were the pain points, what did we want to bring to the community? And I think you pointed out just some of the common things like bugs and just the lack of control. And those are all things that we just kind of huddled around. How do we address things, how do we address that thing? And I think we’ve made some really pointed contributions to addressing those key core items in the MVP of GatherPress. But no, I don’t think there was really a date when I joined.

Mike:
You just started showing up.

Mervin:
Exactly. You Jeff, Paul, just let us know when you can join.

Mike:
No, that was before Jeff. That was before Jeff. Jeff came a couple years later. Paul was there early. Yeah, you’re right. So yeah, it was mostly early on. It was me, you, Paul, Dan was there a little bit hanging out and yeah, that’s what I meant. Dan Griffin. Yeah, I don’t remember who else. There was probably a couple people that showed up and left. And the other thing with GatherPress, one of the reasons why it took so long is that we are all very busy people and we’d pick it up off the shelf, start working on it really hard for a month and put it back up on the shelf for another couple months, pull it back down to the shelf and there was a lot of that until about I would say a year and a half, two years ago, or I would say a year and a half ago, we, or at least I and you and others were like, okay, we can’t just keep putting this up on the shelf and take it get down again. We need to actually get through it, but it’s a journey. There was a lot to build.

Mervin:
I think all throughout the materializing of the idea. Not only did we keep tinkering with it in conversations, but we kept touching people in the community and leadership and even sponsors. I remember discussing this with some sponsors about, Hey, how do we get more involved in helping you guys host events? How can we do more things in events and promoted and organized and RSVP things? So I think all throughout the journey of the concept and then you starting to work on it and a couple of people coming into and contributing into it, we kept putting feelers out there to the community team and to sponsors. What do you want in an event management that is for the community, by the community? We’ve talked a lot about Central and WordCamp camptix, how there are certain things that it does really, really well and we wish we had the same control or influence over the general dashboard widget and the whole meetup aspect of our community. So yes, it was a couple of people chipping away at it, but we also had input and guidance from many people along the way that kept giving us good direction towards the MVP.

Mike:
Absolutely. I remember those. A lot of those early meetings. I want to include Patricia more in this conversation because she’s been silent patiently listening to us reminisce about the history of GatherPress.

Patricia:
And I can understand also that we have all gone through a pandemic, so of course all meetups were canceled, all events, all WordCamps, and I was not there in your team, but I mean it must have been like, what’s the point now? for now on hold, I guess I’m not sure.

Mike:
I still had a meetup going on during the pandemic. Mervin, I think you may have too. Did you manage a meetup during the pandemic or no?

Mervin:
Very few. When I was in New York, I was still in New York at the time, me and Steve, we hosted a couple of online events. I didn’t officially, I was slated to lead WordCamp New York City 2020. I didn’t officially declare we’re going virtual, so we just kind of transitioned our monthly meetups to be virtual and that I think many people in the community will echo the sentiment, that idea and that methodology kind of fizzled out after the first few months. All of the camps went virtual, all of the meetups went virtual and we all realized at some point we need in-person connections at some point. It’s good to have virtual events and fun hackathons and regular meetups online are great, but eventually we do want to have it face-to-face break bread and have snacks and help each other on their laptops.

Mike:
Patricia, were you doing any virtual meetups with your groups or did you just press pause during Covid?

Patricia:
We tried twice, but there was not a lot of people and the first time we had a technical issue and then people didn’t show up. It was sad because I was the lead organizer of WordCamp Geneva 2020 in March, and end of February, I had to cancel before it was mandatory to cancel in my country and I got people say “why do you cancel? We can still meet if we’re less than 1000”. I said let’s see in two weeks. But yeah, and after that we tried to stay connected through online meetups, but it’s not the same. You do not have the snacks and the hugs.

Mike:
So we all have that in common. We were all lead organizers of a WordCamp in 2020 that got canceled.
I was months away. You were WordCamp in New York 2020 and you were slated for the fall. We always talk to you because we want to make sure because I’m WordCamp Montclair and I was lead organizer for 2020 and since the proximity is very close, we try to be one in spring, well, we say whatever New York wants to do with the opposite.

Mervin:
WordCamp NYC 2020 had the venue contract in hand the beginning of March, which is when everything started to point in the direction of a lockdown. And yeah, I was just days away from potentially costing us quite a bit of money because I know of other conferences, like medical conferences in Long Island that were in April that canceled and they lost quite a bit of money because of the cancellation clauses of March 2020, days away.

Mike:
We already gave money, but we were able to, we had a good relationship with MSU, and they were able to hold on. We were able to apply that when we did have our conference in 2022. That’s good. Yeah, so that worked out well.

Patricia:
Yeah, I’m not sure, maybe one of you remember before the pandemic on meetup.com, we could not add online events, only in-person events, right? and that’s what I liked also when I saw GatherPress two months ago, you can choose either in-person or online and you just paste the link to the online meeting.

Mike:
Or both. Yeah, so we have blocks that allow it to be both. I believe the way Meetup works is this is one or the other and granted I think there’s ways around, you could always post something here or whatever, but you can have both an in-person place and an online and a virtual place in case you are putting on a meetup that has both a virtual aspect and an in-person aspect. So I was cognizant of that when we built GatherPress or while we were building GatherPress and I’m like, this seems like a limitation that doesn’t need to be there in Meetup. Why can’t you have a venue and an online link? We also put in, I noticed this on Meetup also and I noticed it in our GatherPress huddles that I would post a link in there and much like the way Meetup worked, it’s like if you say you’re going, the link becomes available, if not, the link is hidden and that was an apples to apples with Meetup. I changed that because I was finding I’d post something and people would just jump on the Zoom link. I’m like, I don’t want people jumping on a Zoom link on a Wednesday when the thing’s on a Friday. So I added the feature to have it only enable five minutes before the meeting and have it make it available and then once the meeting’s over, it’s disabled again. So it’s only open for that. I mean it’s just another way of just, it’s not that people are going to do something like most people aren’t going to do something malicious or anything. I mean obviously people do because we’ve all gone through that, but it just adds a little bit of like, Hey, this meeting’s happening, then this link will be there. Then you don’t need to click on it now.

Mervin:
Less time. Less time for somebody to just grab the link and go program something.

Mike:
And it just makes it just easier. It’s an easier flow I think it makes it more able to be understood rather than confusing being like why is this link active now? The meetup’s not happening till Friday. We should also mention that for anybody listening that if you do want to join us in our huddles, what we call’em GatherPress weekly huddles. They happen every Friday at 11:00 AM Eastern Time.

Patricia:
Sorry, which is 4:00 PM UTC.

Mike:
Yes. Thank you Patricia for, she internationalizes all my speaking and everything. So yes, and every Friday. So if you go to gatherpress.org spelled exactly the way it sounds, G-A-T-H-E-R-P-R-E-S-S .org, you can see our upcoming events. It is powered by GatherPress surprise surprise. So if you do RSVP, you are using GatherPress and everybody’s welcome. We will all be there if you want to pick our brains or talk to us, but we’re always looking to have new people join us and get new opinions, new ways of thinking. I’ll even say when Patricia joined, I am monolingual, I speak English only and a couple other languages very poorly, but she’s really, really helped us make GatherPress less Americanized, I guess, which is something when you’re trying to build a global plugin is something you need and helped us translate. The first thing you did was translate the plugin the French.

Patricia:
Before that, I checked if all your text strings were correctly internationalized and created the .pot file for all translators to be able to translate. And when it’ll be on the official WordPress repository, then it’ll be available to be translated on translate.wordress.org. So almost 200, I think, languages. And yes, I translated to French and I discovered things that I didn’t know about blocks.

Mike:
You and I both

Patricia: yeah, about .json files and I was used to .po/.mo files and now I know there are .json files for blocks, for the text in blocks.

Mike:
We try to make GatherPress cutting edge.

Mervin:
And I think there’s a great way for you to feature your other contributions, Patricia, because since you’ve come onto the project, you’ve definitely accelerated us getting out and presenting something more publicly. So the proposal was an excellent exercise that you led and you dragged us through all of the editing and really good composition there. And now we have something presented for the community to consume and digest and people to see what’s been going on with this MVP. So can you tell us about what motivated you to really help us just get the word out there and where do you see our next milestone with the project? What’s a point that we can come to where we receive all of these feedback, we touch some of the community leadership? Where do you see us going to next?

Patricia:
Yeah, so to reply to your first question, when I joined I saw that you were very advanced on building it as I’m not a developer, I was thinking maybe I have nothing to add, but I did. And during one of the huddles you say, we need to propose that, so we gathered all the points, the features and what we want to say. And I put that in French in written form in French, and I translated with ChatGPT and DeepL and I asked even after that, a friend, a British friend to be sure my English was good enough. And then we reached out to a lot of people from the community and that’s maybe my force that I know a lot of people and it’s easy for me to meet people and make friends when I’m at WordCamps. So I thought of a lot of people to send this link to the draft that you and me, Mervin, we have made that draft and we had a lot of feedback that ended in the final draft, I mean for the proposal. So that was very good because there were things that I didn’t know, for example, that meetup.com had lost two years of statistical data. I didn’t know that.

And Victor Ramirez wrote about that and I knew about the price that Meetup.com is costing to WPCS, I mean Central, WordPress Community Support. So all of this ended in the proposal that we published on the 22nd of January and yeah, I see a lot of great feedback now in the comments,n the comments. And please anyone who is listening that do not hesitate to comment because we had just today a comment from a person who attend meetups, she’s in Catalonia, and she wrote a comment like: What? it didn’t exist before? We have to solve that! Because you were mentioning bugs in Meetup.com, but even if it was a perfect platform, it’s still a proprietary place. So I’m not sure how many people say… I saw, how do you say? that traffic to meetup.com was 60% coming from the US so maybe it’s more about discoverability in the US but here in Europe, like a few years ago, people who were going on meetup.com, I talk for my city in Geneva, where mostly the international people, the people who speak English only and work in international organizations and go there to the yoga class on Meetup and not very often discovered the WordPress meetup Geneva, we have 800 members and I think 750 never came. And on the opposite, there has been people who discovered our events in the dashboard widget and then they came, maybe they were not registered or they registered on Meetup and they said: “I don’t understand, I thought I was on WordPress and why did I have to register on that thing? What is it Meetup?” That was more the kind of experience that I had. Yeah, when someone told me, maybe it was in October 2023, last year, three months ago “you know there are some people who something maybe I should introduce to them”. I said “yeah, well I’m not a developer, they are doing, why should I?” And then there was that December 7th when I posted my rant on Slack and the day after you said, come join!

Mike:
The rant. Heard around the world.

Patricia:
Yeah, it has not even been two months now, like early December. We are early February 2024. So yes, we did a lot of things in two months. Right.

Mike:
Yeah!

Mervin:
Absolutely.

Mike:
One of the big things that I want to still bring up while we have others listening to this, the areas, Patricia, you brought up something really interesting. You’re like, this thing’s far along, it’s developers, I’m not sure how to contribute. And once we started talking, we figured out a lot of areas where you were able to contribute and really help us drive this project forward. Other areas where I noticed especially is getting someone to join us and look at our project from an accessibility eye. We haven’t had someone now, I think between the three of us, we all have basic knowledge of how to build an accessible plugin, but having someone, especially when we are looking at creating a community project that is for everybody, we need to make sure that our plugin is accessible and I’ve done my best to do that, but I am not an accessibility expert. So where else, and I’m going to put this out to both Patricia and Mervin. Where else in the project do you think, man, if we just had somebody that knew a lot about this, that could really help us position our plugin better in front of the community?

Mervin:
Sure. Well, let me start by giving you some props because since your background is with big humongous VIP websites, I think you’ve laid a pretty good foundation for it to scale. So I think thankfully we have a lot of good pillars and a good foundation to let this plugin be poked at scale. You’ve got unit tests in there. We have a lot of good groundwork that has been solid. Areas for accessibility, I’ll definitely keep that one high up on the priorities list because myself, as a visually impaired person, my main accessibility use case is magnification and for my use case Windows and the browser magnification helps me just go from my whatever, 90% vision to a 100% usable and comfortable vision level. I know that’s just one use case among many with screen readers, different types of screen, colors, contrast, ratios and other accessible tools that are necessary. So certainly accessibility. I think Patricia has also laid the groundwork for translation now, so we have that ability to translate it to many other languages.

I’m looking forward to feedback that’s going to come from the community for what areas we might be missing, but I feel pretty confident that we have an MVP that’s pretty robust and that meets the primary objectives of this tool. Scalability, security I think are good, accessibility, does need to be a bit more polished and tested and just poked at to ensure that we meet critical objectives there. I think design wise, it’s functional. We’ve observed WordPress and Gutenberg design standards kind of in a vanilla format so folks can adapt it to their appropriate branding. So I think we’re in a really good spot. Functionality is where I expect we’re going to get a lot of feedback for functionality, which is really, really broad, but we’ll look at what to incorporate in the base plugin and then what to incorporate via addons. And we’ve talked about SSO, we’ve talked about tickets and we already talked ticket plugins fairly well. But yeah, that’s my thoughts.

Patricia:
I have two things to add. The first one is about accessibility. I reached out to a friend, Anne-Mieke Bovelett, who is an accessibility expert, and her reply that she gave us, it was that we should ask someone who is really living a disability and to test for us. So let’s hope someone who is listening could join and test for us. Another thing I wanted to add is that I have been following all the comments on the social media about the proposal and there has been a few misconceptions. One person said “I have not, I’m an co-organizer, I’m non-sponsored and I don’t want to spend time or to lose time to self-host”. So we have to be very clear that for the community it would not be self-hosted. The proposal is to hopefully be on the wordpress.org network, like the WordCamps, like the new events.wordpress.org.

So this was the first misconception and another replied to me on that network with a letter, a single letter, and that person said “Why do you say it would be better than sign up to Meetup? So we would’ve to sign up to GatherPress”. So again, no, it’s if you have wordpress.org account and the pilot program is accepted and run, so that would be your wordpress.org account. And for all the people at the meetups who are still not on wordpress.org, that could bring a lot of new people who would discover other events, who might potentially join as contributors to the project also. That’s the thing, but at the same time, you can self-host and actually my friend Michelle from here in Switzerland, Michelle Bulloch, with her family, she organizes concerts, classical concerts, and she has just installed a version of GatherPress on her personal website and that’s just amazing. She didn’t need the RSVP feature. So it’s very simple, just remove the block, very easy, so it’s very… can adapt and it use the blocks and very well, and it’s so much looking like Core WordPress, you are not lost with some plugins, we see a lot of different design you don’t feel in a WordPress dashboard. Here it’s just like if it was so, I don’t know the word for that, “ingrained”?

Mike:
Very cool. Yeah, I’m really excited about that. Well, for two reasons. A, it’s self-hosted, and B, it’s not a WordPress meetup. So just kind of seeing when our envision is GatherPress is a plugin for the community by the community with a roadmap that is designed by the WordPress community. However, it can be used by anyone. It is open source. So if you have, as Patricia’s friend is, a choir meetup or a choir gathering that you want to use this plugin for and not spend 20 something dollars a month on meetup fees, you can absolutely do that. I find it very interesting, especially she doesn’t use the RSVP feature, so it makes me start thinking a little bit now my technical brain’s working like, all right, I got to add some settings to make that not available in some cases and stuff some I’ve been putting, I dunno, you two been seeing I’ve been putting in tickets like crazy last night when I came home from Palm Springs with Covid, it’s very minor, but I’m still isolating myself from the family, so I’m just in my office working on GatherPress.

Mervin:
Good motivation

Mike:
Yeah, motivation

Patricia:
On my project site, which is not about WordPress, I mean my idea was to add a form, a lead form instead of the RSVP, for people to register to my mailing list when they register for an event. So yeah, we can do anything because it’s a plugin, it’s open source and you are already talking about addon plugins that can be added and anyone can add features with addons that would hook on it.

Mervin:
Yeah, of course. We’ve got the desire, one of the big desired end goals is for the community to embrace, GatherPress and for it to run probably parallel for some time with Meetup and then ultimately for the community to just leverage an open source solution for all of these needs. But right alongside that is this is an open source plugin. It has the same capabilities, it operates with the same four freedoms that WordPress does. So even outside of the WordPress and tech community, if there’s a use case for an event management application that is simple to use and customizable, this is right up there as meeting that need.

Mike:
That brings up when we were discussing, and it was actually, I had it in the back of my mind and I think I brought it up to both of you when I decided, hey, I think our first companion plugin needs to be a meetup importer because I sent the plugin to Michelle Frechette on Twitter like, “Hey Michelle, would you mind testing this out?” This was early on this before the proposal, this is when we were just kind of chatting with friends of the project, friends of ours and friends of the project that we know would be kind to us. Mervin and I had not really shown it to a lot of people yet, and she’s like, “Hey, how do I import from my meetup stuff?” I’m like, that’s funny because you can’t, but we were planning on putting a companion plugin and I put the repo together.

I just added the setting that can add the API token to it, but that’s going to be our first companion plugin to GatherPress. One of the big things I look for in GatherPress for the community is removing as much friction as possible for organizers and for attendees. And one of those things is how can we automate some of these things? How can we as if the pilot program is running things in tandem, I don’t want people to have to go and input, do more administrative work. And I think some of the things that people had mentioned in our proposal, I know one I saw one in particular is like, “I’m a meetup organizer, we just went through hell with Covid trying to do things and I’m exhausted and I don’t want to do any more work than I’m already doing. No one’s going to do it”. And I get that sentiment as a meetup organizer that also went through Covid, that did meetups through Covid and then is now trying to bring meetups back in person with my community. I understand being overworked and exhausted, so doing our best to transition from one to the other and removing a lot of that friction and extra work or making that extra work as minimal as possible is front of mind of this project and on this team.

Mervin:
I think along the roadmap of our desired integration with the community would be likely to get merged into Central. There’s no SSO that’s necessary. This happens inside of .org. So the same way that we do Camptix and other access for meetup organizers and camp organizers, but companion plugins are one of the ways that we’re going to roadmap some of the requests we’re likely to receive.

Mike:
It’s important for the GatherPress project and when we were thinking about or the way we think about things, and it’s the same way the WordPress project thinks about things with WordPress, what things belong in the core plugin, right? So when ideas come out, I mean it’s front of mind. Is this a core feature of the plugin or is this something that is a companion? So even something like a meetup importer. Patricia, I’ll go back to your friend as an example. If she’s just standing up a choir site and using GatherPress, I mean she may have had a meetup group, but she may just be starting from scratch and she doesn’t need all that technical debt that’s in there or extra, well, it’s not technical debt, but it’s extra functionality that’s kind of muddying up the admin for a feature that a good amount of people are not going to need.

So things like that. Also things around, especially very early on Mervin, when we were talking early on the project, we’re like, we are going to do something with BuddyPress. BuddyPress is another popular community project. It has a lot of functionality that GatherPress can leverage to build events but also build a community. So I would see when if we put this on a WordPress network that BuddyPress would also be part of that infrastructure of GatherPress and building a companion plugin to happily marry the features of GatherPress into BuddyPress through filters or different actions, different APIs that BuddyPress offers around, even stuff like notifications of emails or notifications about events. We would really dive into that and build out those connections and make it all integrate very nicely. But having that even that as a companion plugin.

Patricia:
As a side note, yeah, I love BuddyPress actually and I use it on my upcoming membership site so that plus GatherPress will be amazing and yeah, I love BuddyPress and I know they need more people in the team, like BBPress by the way, and they need for documentation on the BuddyPress project. Anyone is interested, you can join the BuddyPress channel in Slack. And I say hello to my friend Mathieu (iMath) who I can see, commit, commit, commit to BuddPress for like almost 2 decades. Integrate both will be great because I can imagine the tabs you have profile, sites and stuff. It could be like all the events you have attended.

Mike:
Yeah, I could see a lot of cross-pollination between the projects too, which I think would be kind of interesting if we have a new shiny WordPress network that we’re using for meetups, it could really, if we’re using GatherPress, if we’re using BuddyPress, if we’re using BBPress, you have all these different people that are really interested in what’s going on here and contributing to all the different projects where needed to support this new thing that’s being powered by all these great projects that the WordPress community has built over the years. It’s a real testament to this community that people can get together, have an idea and then execute on it, and everybody’s contributing in different ways where their strengths are, where they can find their ability to contribute. It’s just an amazing, amazing experience.

Patricia:
Nice. I also want to say to people who hesitate to join a team, and I should know because last year I was in a panel at WordCamp Europe like “How to contribute to the WordPress project without knowing how to code”. So I should have known better that I could bring some value to a team of developers.

Mervin:
We see, that’s not uncommon in WordPress in general because everybody sees WordPress. Oh yeah, content management system and open source community of developers is perhaps the default assumption, but no, there’s design, there’s meta, there’s community, there’s translation. So thank you Patricia for still poking in and taking a look behind the curtain.

Patricia:
Yeah, I’m happy to contribute to community for the WordPress project as a whole and to have joined the team here for some outreach, very happy. And you have been very welcoming. And I have to say that the weekly huddles are also very friendly. I made new friends, I begin to know about American football now.

Mike:
We have two Buffalo Bills fans, myself included on that.

Patricia:
And the only other team I knew about was the Jets because of Gary Vee. So I don’t know that much because for me, football is played with the feet and it’s what you call soccer and yeah, we have also people from India in the team and yeah, it was nice talking with one of the Indian team member the other day in the meeting talking about this country that I visited when I was young, younger. And yeah, it’s nice to, that’s what I find also in the WordPress community as a whole, to make friends from the whole world.

Mervin:
I was speaking with some non-techie friends recently and they asked me, I was like, where do you go to many WordPress events? And the people is absolutely core to the community and I get so energized. That’s the best way I could describe it to non WordPress people was I just get energized every time I go to a WordPress event, I see some people I know, some new people, we talk shop and we just otherwise enjoy each other’s company and we’re all very dedicated and very passionate about WordPress, about code, about development, good software, good service. So it’s really energizing to see folks come in and out of projects and introduce new ideas and new cultures. It’s really good. It’s really energizing.

Patricia:
Because I was lucky, honored to be invited for the Community Summit. So that’s why I was in the US.

Mike:
We tried the last time, 2022 was pretty successful. We were at the community table and got a few folks to contribute to GatherPress. We reached out and said: Hey, we have this project. This was early, like I said, 2022, so it was about two years ago or a year and a half ago or whenever that was in that’s that was. I think the point where the project was a little bit more stable and it was getting closer to that MVP. We had some cool contributions done on that day. As Mervin said, he was kind of there for the GatherPress. We were trying to put something together on Contributor Day for GatherPress. I unfortunately wasn’t able to make US that year. I can’t remember if Meghan was able to make it or not or if she was able to make it that day, but it all fell to Mervin had an emergency, so it didn’t really come to fruition there. I’m planning on going to WordCamp US in Portland this year, so I’m hoping that we’re able to get a good Contributor day to GatherPress. That’s months from now who knows what the project’s going to look like. I’m hoping that we are moving forward with things there.

Mervin:
That’s a fantastic wrap up Mike. So what’s going to happen between now and Portland?

Mike:
So what’s going to hit between now and Portland?

Patricia:
There will be WordCamp Europe!

Mike:
There will be WordCamp Europe and I don’t think I’m going to get my company to pay for me to go to that. It’s also right around WordCamp Montclair and I kind of have to go to that one.

Patricia:
But I will be there.

Mike:
You will be there.

Patricia:
Yeah, I’m a co organizer for WordCamp Europe this year, so I will try to free some time for the Contributor day and do some more outreach.

Mike:
We’ll see if we can get more Europeans to join us. And so you’re not solo. You could have other folks that are more ingrained in the project by the time WordCamp Europe comes around and we can have a bunch of people pushing for contributions.

Patricia:
We have one who joined some of our meetings and translated and yes, let’s hope for more people. Yeah, it’ll be that.

Mike:
I’ll be hearing in the States helping you all out. I can jump on a Zoom or whatever or just read some pull requests. I’m more than happy to be involved in the WordCamp Europe Contributor day from my place in New Jersey. But yeah, so that’s the first big one. I think there’s a little bit more, there’s more coordination with the meta team. I’ve been going through a bunch of tickets trying to clean up some more code. Like I said, some of this code’s four years old, so some of it was, I look back at it, I’m like, oh, that wasn’t a good idea. So I’m rewriting pieces of it, hopefully not introducing new and interesting bugs. But we’ll find out. Jeff and Bill have been hard at work with that one ticket where we’re able to remove attendees. So they’ve been doing, there’s all these little things. I think it’s a bunch of little things now. It’s no real big huge things we need to tackle for the MVP now. It’s a lot of cleanup and a couple other little features that people have been kind of chatting about that we’re like, actually, we got some time. We can put this in.

Mervin:
And listening too. We definitely want to encourage folks to take a look at the proposal, take a look at the project and gatherpress.org if you’re so inclined and you’d like to look at a GitHub. We have a project and we have a list of issues that we have on the radar. So take a look at the project at large and wherever you would like to contribute, we welcome all new people that want to get involved.

Mike:
Absolutely.

Patricia:
Yes. And looking forward also for the training team, the learn.wordpress.org to have the evidence if/when, so that’s also a very exciting thing. Maybe it’s time to wrap up before the top of the hour, so maybe where we can find everything about GatherPress, and then about you, Mike, you Mervin, and about me. So yes, you mentioned GitHub, gatherpress.org.

Mervin:
I think gatherpress.org is a pretty good hub for all of the things. So we talk about the project there, we post our Friday gatherings. There’s links to the GitHub repository. There’s links to contact Mike and myself if you want to be added to our Slack group. There’s a feedback form.

Patricia:
A nice video from you as well, now, very nice.

Mike:
Oh, there’s a video, Patricia, you put together for just kind of a basic demo of how to get through GatherPress. That was great.

Patricia:
Yeah, basic demo, but Mervin did something great explaining why we did the proposal and it was really good.

Mervin:
Yeah, we don’t have a lot of social presence, but I think we have a little bit of social, so you can follow us there. But by all means, the proposal, the community channels are definitely the way to let us know how you’re using it, what features we need to consider putting in next.

Patricia:
And where can we find you besides GatherPress, Mervin.

Mervin:
For me, mervinhernandez.com, that’s got my links to all of the things I’m involved in and my socials. And I also frequent the WordPress Make Slack and PostStatus as well. So I’m available on both of those.

Patricia:
Nice. And Mike.

Mike:
mikeauteri.com. It’s a very no frills WordPress website and a blog I barely update, but you can find all my socials on there as well.

Patricia:
And about me, patriciabt.com. But if you are into WordPress is better to add forward slash WordPress, so patriciabt.com/wordpress and on the contact page, all the link to the social, my social profiles. So thank you everyone, and we hope to see you all coming to our huddles. And bye-Bye. Thank you.

Mike:
Bye everybody.