In July, it was announced that WordPress meetup Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. groups will be moving off Meetup.com and onto events.wordpress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/, built on GatherPress. And since August 28, the team working on the project has had an open call for testing which brought in a lot of useful feedback.

As the team moves the project forward for the roughly 700 groups and the people in them, I wanted to give an update on where things stand. First of all, @unintended8, @harmonyromo, and I are still talking to Meetup.com, making them aware of improvements they can make and exploring how they can better support us for as long as the WordPress community meets there. Read on!

1. Now: The call for testing has gone out and work on the feedback is underway.
2. Next: Real groups run real events on it to find what works and what breaks, including using a migration Moving the code, database and media files for a website site from one server to another. Most typically done when changing hosting companies. tool that pulls from meetup.com. If you are interested in helping test this, please comment below as it’s important to have a handful of folks try it.
3. Later: Everyone else moves, once the platform and the migration path have held up through real use.

The team will build a migration tool which will import upcoming events and venues as drafts for the organizer to review and publish. It does not copy the member list. The plan is for someone on the team to run the import rather than the group organizer. Past events are not part of the first round. The migration will first be done manually in order to shape the tool itself and increasingly become more automated based on feedback.

Members join the new group themselves. They follow a link from your Meetup group, sign in with a WordPress.org account, join, and RSVP. So anyone who wants to stay with your group will need a WordPress.org account. Requiring WordPress.org accounts is an important change, so please start preparing now.

If something your group relies on is not there yet, say so. The team is tracking everything on the migration milestone on GitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged by the repository owner. https://github.com/.

One thing that is unknown is whether members can be moved in bulk. The tool could later match Meetup members to existing WordPress.org accounts and add them to a group, or invite people by email. Whether we can do that depends on a decision about member data that has not been made yet. Until it is, joining by hand is the plan.

What happens to a group’s Meetup.com page in the end is also an open question. During a pilot it stays up, and its event listings point at the new platform instead of holding a second RSVP list. Whether it eventually closes, stays as a signpost, or something else is still open, and we are working through it with Meetup.com.

Some groups have not held an event in a while. We have to decide what to do with those dormant groups. My preference is that we reach out to them and ask whether they want help to get going again, and if so help them start on the new platform.

Pilot! If you organize a group and would run one or two events on the new platform, volunteer in #gatherpress-migration on Slack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/ or in the comments here. We especially want groups outside Europe and North America and groups that don’t run in English.

Start on WordPress.org accounts now. If your members already have a WordPress.org account when your group moves, there is nothing for them to do on the day. Mention it at your next event. 

Try it! The test group is at events.wordpress.org/group/internal-testing-group. Feedback goes on the call for testing post or in the GitHub repository.

Kudos to @annezazu, @bor0, @patricia70, @mauteri, and the @GatherPress contributor community.