I have been in a couple Blogging 101 courses over the last couple of years and I have enjoyed them as they push me to continue writing and more importantly, I always stumble upon a couple great sites that I frequent well after the course is done.  One of the things I always enjoyed about the course is the sense of Community.  You had people of all different blogging/WordPress expertise working together and helping each other out along the way.  I was in a course a little over a year ago and was thinking wouldn’t it be great to continue the conversation after the course was done?

Now I know you could still visit people’s sites and make comments and suggestions.  However, by only doing that you never get a chance to ask questions?  You could end your post with a question but what if your question was about WordPress specifically, or a Theme, or just anything else that is random but doesn’t really fit as a blog post on your site for people to respond to?  Also, that is assuming you have a magnitude of followers that actually see that post on a given week/day.

As I was in February 2016 Blogging 101 course, it was on my mind again about how could we do this.  I have seen it done before but most of the time they wall it off with a Private Site and then it makes it hard for people to even find it or know what it is about unless you stumbled upon it by someone else’s post.  Also, there were blogs I started to follow that continued my thinking about this little project.  One specifically by Amanda titled “It Matters”, which it really resonated with me and I suggest you read it as well now.  Ok, now that you are back.

Insert, the Bloggers Meetup, where what finally pushed me into starting this was based on a simple post I read in the Blogging 101 course where a couple of people were asking what will happen next after the course is over.  I saw it as a time to recruit these people who had the same interest as myself in creating an Open Community where Bloggers could come and go and just chat with other bloggers.  You can read more about my initial thoughts on the Bloggers Meetup as I don’t want to republish the whole thing here (also this is getting long right?).  However, I would encourage any of you to register on the site and then I hope to see you chatting with the Community.  Also, since it is just starting up feel free to throughout your ideas of how to grow or what you would like to see it become.

Finally, I want to thank everyone so far for registering and showing interest in this Community project.  Not to mention some of the first people who reached out to me like @Amanda and @AmeenasMusings, who have really helped get things off the ground there.  I can’t wait to see what is next for all of us!