Why Our Own Site?

Impetus

• meetup.com's extended outage earlier this year exposed a serious issue with depending on their site for managing our group — we couldn't! And we don't have any member contact information to have been able to contact them outside of meetup.com.
• Month after month, we find ourselves answering the same questions over and over again. Wouldn't it be great to be able to simply point them to our site's resource section, that they can access any time?
• To say we cover a lot during our meetups is an understatement. In the past, I've tried to tweet a link or Twitter handle for everything we discuss, but it would be nice to have an archive of meeting notes for later reference. Much easier than trying to fit everything into multiple 140 character tweets and attendees can contribute their own notes.
• Since our meetings are only about 45 min - 1 hour, we've only managed to conceptually cover several topics. Building this site can be an opportunity for us to get our hands dirty implementing the things we've talked about from the very first meeting back in 2012 — having a development environment, keeping a site in version control, professional site deployment, theme development, BuddyPress, etc. We'll have the opportunity to play around with anything we want.

Now, you may ask:

Doesn't meetup.com have some group tools for sharing files and having discussions?

But let's be real, who actually likes using the meetup.com site and has figured out how to do those things? Not to mention, the first point ☝️.

WordPress empowers us to own our data so it just doesn't seem right to run our WordPress meetup on someone else's site. And, not to mention, the first point at the top ☝️

Did I mention, the first point at the top? ☝️

cc @wpgwinnett/organizers