Earlier today, there was a new section of the WordPress.org forums created specifically for meetups. In the announcement post, Jane Wells explained what the purpose of the forum was.
This forum is the first step toward WordPress.org helping to facilitate local WordPress meetups. Some meetups are specific to skill/interest (users, developers, theme designers, etc) while others are general interest groups that touch on all topics around publishing with and developing for WordPress.
We’ll be rolling out features on this site over the coming year to help support these groups, but in the meantime, we hope this forum will provide an easier way to find like minded WordPress friends and collaborators in your area.
If you’re an organizer of a WordPress specific meetup, this is an excellent opportunity for you to spread the word. Although the service is not free for organizers, you can see if there is a meetup in your area by visiting WordPress.meetup.com which is what I used to find a few meetups near me.
Speaking of meetups, there is one coming up for the Northeast Ohio area on March 24th that will go in depth on WordPress 3.1.
A lot of meetups don’t use meetup.com b/c it’s a commercial business and costs money, plus then meetup.com owns all the data. There are a number of meetup groups running their own sites on WordPress and/or BuddyPress.
Exactly – stupid, stupid, stupid….if there’s gonna be a site to list WordPress meetups at least the damn thing should be running on WordPress….WTH??
I’m a co-organizer for the Seattle WP meetup and it is awesome. We use meetup.com for tracking out meetups because it was the easiest and best platform. Just because WP can do something doesn’t mean it is always the best tool – sometimes using existing tools is better.
I agree with Nick on this one! I’m an organiser for the Sydney and Brisbane WP Meetups. Meetup is a great platform for organising everything! Not only does it look after RSVP’s, ideas from users, messageboards you’ve got their massive database of users to leverage when you signup. I think if we’d used WordPress for our Meetup group it would’ve taken us considerably longer to gain attention and to form a group with great numbers.
@Jane – Meetup.com is expensive for just meeting up but the site has everything we (North East Ohio Meetup) needs to conduct our meetups. On our first meeting, we had a discussion on whether to user a WordPress site with custom domain to have for our meetings or use Meetup.com. We decided to go with Meetup because the WordPress site would be just another site that needed maintenance, would need some sort of kick ass events calendar which is something that is still lacking overall in the plugin community, and it would be difficult to spread the word regarding our meetup group when people go to Meetup.com and use their zip code to see if anything is near them.
In our case, WordPress just wasn’t the best tool for the job. As for the data, that data really isn’t important.
@JTPratt Media – Meetup.com has been around for awhile and it’s how I discovered relevant meetups in my area. It’s also a cool site and has much of what we needed to get out group underway. After we registered our group, we immediately began to gain members from the local area. This would have been hard to do with a brand new WordPress site. They have so many people creating WordPress meetups that they dedicated an entire sub domain to it.