Well, this is not the best way to start blogging again in 2019.
Last week I decided to stop organising the monthly events for the St. Albans WordPress Meetup. I am going to try to explain here the reasons of this decision.
It did not feel right.
It happens slowly, one does not just wake up one day and make a decision like that (or you shouldn’t do it anyway).
At the beginning is just a feeling inside that tells you that something is not right.
The feeling stays there for a while and then, as it does not goes away, is when you realise you need to think about it and do something, but you are not sure what.
There have been so many things happening around the world of WordPress during the past months (years?) and I am not going to enter into details here. Lets say I do not like how the leader of WordPress (Matt) is handling the brand, the people around him and the community.
After thinking about it for a while, I listened to him on the State of the Art 2018 at WordCamp US (full video here and more important the Q&A here). After that I took a decision.
I know that organising the meetup is a volunteer thing and helping WordPress (brand) is not the goal of the meetup, but helping others and the local community. But doing this volunteer work help WordPress (as a brand) and that helps Matt indirectly, as he is the owner of that brand. He also use the brand to achieve his business goals (this week news about Google partnering with WordPress, when it was partnering with Automattic and the fact the wordpress.com business exists are some examples of this).
So I have decided I will keep working with WordPress and I will keep helping other people (with WordPress too) but I do not want to do this wearing the WordPress hat.
This also open the possibility to have a more open meetup, with space for other CMSs, open source projects, and a different approach.
I need to clarify this point: WordPress never limited me on any way on how to organise the meetup. The only rules they enforce are about accessibility and to make sure the meetup can reach everyone (for example, there is a rule that says that the meetup should be free to access). I agree with all those rules and I will keep them.
So what now?
I am trying to figure out everything. I really do not have a plan in mind yet, just some ideas. These are some of them:
- I would love that somebody take over the Official WordPress meetup and I would love to assist.
- I want to keep organising monthly meetups.
- I will need to figure out some stuff, like finding another venue, as WordPress was paying for the current one, get a meetup account, pick a new name, and things like that.
- The new meetup will be about the online world, developers, designers, business, WordPress (of course) and other CMSs, technology, security, etc.
So, if you are interested in the new Meetup, please join this mailing list, which I will use to notify you about new events and updates on the meetup (and nothing else).
Join here to the mailing list for updates and notification of new events
Thank you very much.
