WordPress Meetups

In our October update, we mentioned the WordPress Foundation has an official Meetup.com account through which it covers costs of organizer dues.

As of this month, 23 meetups are now under this central account.

There’s a lot of cool stuff in the works for the Meetup.com Program:

  • Making WordPress Events is a discussion forum for WordPress event news and updates, as well as an online resource for organizers and volunteers (including, most recently, a series on meetup best practices).
  • Buying and sending out items like projectors and video cameras to meetup groups that need them.
  • A variety of training sessions, with the help of the Support and Community teams, to bring professional WordPress education to more people. As curriculums are tested and approved, they will be available online for use by meetup groups running official training sessions.
  • A core team of volunteers to work on meetup guidelines for organizers.
  • Other plans to expand the program, from a monthly email that suggests and provides possible content to groups, to meetup starter packs with fun stuff like flyers, table signs, buttons, stickers, sign-in sheets, and a T-shirt for a new organizer to wear to their first meetup.

As you can see, 2013 is already a busy year for WordPress meetups. We expect more groups to join in this spring — if you’re looking to add your meetup group to the WordPress Foundation account, please visit and follow along at Making WordPress Events for what’s happening with meetups.

2 thoughts on “WordPress Meetups”

  1. The WordPress Meetup organizer in Chapel HiIl, NC has this in his group’s messages:

    “Jane Wells, who heads up Community for the WordPress Foundation, which runs WordPress.org, sent out an email today to let WordPress Meetup Organizers know of upcoming changes to how WordPress Meetups are handled.”

    “First and foremost, all WordPress Meetups are intended to be *free.* Charging for WordPress Meetups to cover costs for snacks or nominal room rental fees must be done through an alternate method, if at all.

    Running a WordPress Meetup as part of your business is frowned upon. Certainly, opportunities for WordPress work will arise simply through touting your expertise with WordPress, but making money off of a WordPress Meetup is frowned upon.”

    With this in mind, I wonder how WordPress Foundation would feel about the Raleigh, NC WordPress Meetup group. – http://www.meetup.com/Raleigh-WordPress-Meetup-Group/ – who charges for attendance, has a closed “by approval only” membership, is a Meetup.com group run as a strategy to drum up new client business for a web design company based in Durham and is not even based in Raleigh, but holds the vast majority of its meetings in Durham, about 10 to 15 miles away from Raleigh. This group has about 600+ members, many of whom I suspect are from Raleigh. I’ve never joined because Durham is an hour away roundtrip – and I’m in Raleigh . I gotta believe this practice generates a lot of ill will toward both Meetup.com and toward WordPress.

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