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Sarah Gooding

Add Your Meetup Group to the Central WordPress Account on Meetup.com

meetupsIf you run a local WordPress meetup, you’re invited to move it under the central WordPress account on meetup.com. Jen Mylo created a form where meetup coordinators can submit their meetup to be included. The awesome benefit is that WordPress will cover the meetup.com dues for your listing.

Jen posted a number of simple guidelines that were created by active meetup group volunteers. Your group will have to fulfill these before submitting to the central account. I won’t list them all here, but this is a summary: Essentially, you can’t use your local meetup to pimp out your business or yourself. Leave Mr. Salesman at home and join a meetup to connect with other WordPress fans. Meetups are for the benefit of the community and polite and respectful behavior is expected. If you organize a meetup that qualifies, use the form to get in touch with Jen Mylo.

A some point in the future, meetup group listings will most likely switch over to using SupportPress, as they do for WordCamps. For now, they’ll be consolidating all the meetups on meetup.com. Please note that the meetup interest form is not just for new meetup groups but is also available for existing WordPress meetups that want to transfer the group over to the central account.

It’s very cool that WordPress is supporting local meetups by covering their meetup.com dues. Help spread the word to get this information out there to local meetup organizers that you know.

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7 responses to “Add Your Meetup Group to the Central WordPress Account on Meetup.com”

  2. This is a bit worrisome to me, based on my experience dealing with WordCamp Central’s heavy-handed approach to WordCamps.

    I worry that the power brokers will, at some point in the future, start to issue demands and exert more control over our local community than is wanted or needed. The kind folks in San Francisco or wherever don’t always know what’s best for my people in Minneapolis.

    And what do we get in exchange for handing over the keys to the kingdom? A couple hundred bucks a year? Frankly, I’d rather pass a hat.

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  3. @Toby Cryns – Yes, they’re clearly evil for wanting to pay the meetup.com fees for you, group all the local meetup groups together to help improve the listings and ability for people to find meetups, grow the local communities, and provide free resources to allow local meetup groups to have better and more interesting meetups and such.

    If you don’t want to join up, then don’t. No huhu. Presenting people with a form they can use to request to join in is hardly overly demanding. They ain’t shutting you down or anything.

    In the long run, it would be pretty cool if all information regarding WordPress users and user groups and communities and WordCamps and everything else was consolidated, no? It would be pretty cool if people could visit a new area and quickly find people with similar interests and people to work together with and local communities to help with support and such. Getting communities on board with that and using a central space is step 1.

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  5. @Toby Cryns – Not exactly. I’m not intimately familiar with the nature of meetup.com, other than having muddled through their APIs a bit.

    Essentially, there is a WordPress Foundation account (or something like that) and they ask you to add it as an organizer to the meetup group. This is so the billing can be combined to that account and sent to just one location or something along those lines. However, the other listed organizers remain organizers of the individual group and have all the same admin rights as before. Just has to do with the billing, really.

    There’s also something about the group being added to the “WordPress community” or some other weird meetup specific thing, to boost the rankings somehow. Not sure on that. I dunno, meetup is weird.

    But the goal isn’t to take-over the group or to tell people how to best run their meetups. It is to defray the overhead and expenses (we like WordPress to be free), to provide support in the form of best practices and other guidelines and help (mostly stuff made by other meetup organizers), and things along these lines. All this stuff started from the WordPress Community Summit a bit over a year ago, and has been discussed on the make/community site:

    http://make.wordpress.org/community/?s=meetup

    (Sorry for the weird character set issues, some of these posts recently migrated and we had some importing problems)

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  7. @Otto – Thanks for sharing those links and info. There’s lots of good stuff in there that would be helpful to our meetup here in Minneapolis. Many of the goals outlined by Jen have already been implemented or are in progress with our local group, including the decentralization of control, which I wholeheartedly endorse.

    I’ll give this some more thought…

    The other thing for us is that the bulk of our communication goes through Google Groups…

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