It sits there gathering dust.
Now I don’t mean to have the first words out of my mouth sound negative. It’s just a fact. And that’s what I want to talk about today. Kind of a related topic following up my last thoughts on a IRL WooCommerce event. And the fact that we are just starting to get back to in-person events.
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The WooCommerce Builder Community Meetup Meetup
On March 4, 2021 we did our first Woo Builder kickoff event meetup. Of course it was online, and was intended to follow the format of a host and guest kind of interview. Maybe even a panel.
To understand what led up to this and my own experiences with meetups, well, a little history.
My first history with a WordPress meetup was the local Seattle WordPress meetup. I was a co-organizer for over four years starting in Jan. 2010. Those were good years and we had well attended in-person meetups with a lot of energy. Over time that energy wound down a bit. For the next 6 years, in the same meetup I was an event host. Fast forward to January 2015, Michael Tieso and myself started one of the first WooCommerce meetups, again, based in Seattle. It went pretty well, but never gained much traction.
One things led to another and it slow faded. Then Covid hit and I tried to bring it back hoping an online event might pick up the pace. Well, it never really did.
Do the Woo comes in to the picture
When I turned the focus to Do the Woo, I also tried to twist the meetup to be more builder and developer focused. Before I created the Builder Meetup, I started having guests or focused topics, but still the numbers were low and it wasn’t really any different. Since we were still in the waves of Covid, staying online was the only option and I started the Builder meetup and although it was still based in Seattle, I looked at more of a global audience. Well, during that time we did 15 events and, again, I just didn’t see potential. There were likely several reasons, the biggest being that people were burned out on online events.
On July 30 2021, I did a post with similar questions and concerns. The day before, July 29 was the last WooCommerce builder meetup and it sits and waits over on Meetup.com.
The future of the builder meetup
Bringing us back to today, right now, the foreseeable future of this meetup hangs by a thread. As anyone knows, it’s not simple to organize a successful meetup. WooCommerce is continuing to encourage the meetups and I’m sure some have started to creep back into in-person events again. Others are likely remaining online. How active or not they all are, I cannot say.
But as I look at the Woo Builder Community meetup, I continue to have more questions than answers. Obviously, no matter the situation, it will not become an in-person meetup, for two reasons. First, it would need to be near me and I am now 3.5 hours from Seattle. Geographically it’s not going to happen. And even if I were in Seattle, well, I wouldn’t give that another attempt because we have been there, done that.
Also, throw in the fact that next spring we will be relocating to Porto, Portugal. There’s that.
So it leaves me to ponder if I should start up an online meetup again. There are three challenges I see.
First, does anyone still want yet another online event?
Secondly, if so, will some discussion event for builders and developers really pan out?
Thirdly, if we were to go back to smaller discussions with less interaction, will anyone show up?
And to top that off, when we talk IRL events, I hear more and more people saying the importance of keeping things smaller, local vs. this large geographic events such a some of the WordCamps are.
These are all things I am pondering right now
So as you can see, I don’t have answers right now. But if you have any thoughts on this, feel free to dm me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Post Status, WordPress and WooCommerce Slack.
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