GatherPress vs NarraFirma

Running a meetup, a user group, a conference, or a class? GatherPress gives you what you need to publish events, collect RSVPs, and keep everyone in the loop, all from your own WordPress site. Your events live on your site. You own the data, you control how it looks, and you keep the relationship with the people who show up. GatherPress is built by the WordPress community for the people who organize it: meetup organizers, WordCamp teams, user groups, and anyone else who gets people together in a room. It is free, open source, and shaped by the people using it every day. What you can do Publish events with the date, time, venue, and everything people need to know Collect RSVPs, with anonymous listing for attendees who would rather not be named Let people RSVP without an account, so nobody bounces off a signup wall Let attendees bring guests Email everyone who is coming, or everyone who is not, without leaving WordPress Run events in person, online, or both, with maps for physical venues Build and arrange it all in the block editor Multisite ready and fully translatable Try it before you install Hit the Live Preview button on this page to open a working demo in your browser. No signup, no setup, and real data to click around in. Prefer to watch first? There is a short intro demo. Join our community GatherPress is built in the open, and contributions are always welcome, whether that is code, translations, documentation, or just telling us what broke. Get involved Contributor guide Open issues on GitHub External Services This plugin connects to external services to provide address autocomplete, geocoding, and map tiles for venues. Each service has its own filter so you can point at a self-hosted alternative or disable the feature. Photon geocoding (photon.komoot.io) Used to resolve venue addresses into latitude/longitude coordinates and to power the address autocomplete dropdown while editing a venue. The plugin proxies these requests server-side: your WordPress site sends the search query string and a User-Agent identifying the site (plugin version, WordPress version, site home URL) to the Photon API. Responses are cached on your site for 15 minutes. Photon homepage / terms: https://photon.komoot.io/ Komoot privacy policy: https://www.komoot.com/privacy Override the endpoint (for a self-hosted Photon instance) with the gatherpress_photon_api_url filter. CARTO Basemaps (basemaps.cartocdn.com) Default map tile provider when the OpenStreetMap map platform is selected. When a venue map is displayed on the front end or in the editor, the visitor’s browser requests raster tiles directly from basemaps.cartocdn.com. No data beyond the standard tile coordinates (zoom, x, y) and the visitor’s IP / browser headers is sent. CARTO terms: https://carto.com/legal/ CARTO privacy policy: https://carto.com/privacy/ Override the tile URL or attribution with the gatherpress_interactive_map_tile_url and gatherpress_interactive_map_tile_attribution filters. Google Maps (maps.googleapis.com, www.google.com, maps.google.com) Alternative map provider, only used when a site opts in by choosing “Google Maps” in GatherPress settings. What the visitor’s browser requests depends on whether a Google Maps API key is configured: With an API key, the browser loads the Maps JavaScript API from maps.googleapis.com and renders the map in the page. Without a key, or if that script fails to load, the browser embeds a Google Maps iframe from www.google.com or maps.google.com instead. Either way the request carries the venue coordinates, the visitor’s IP, and standard browser headers. A configured API key travels with the request and is visible in the page source, so restrict it by HTTP referrer in Google Cloud. Google Maps terms: https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/terms/ Google privacy policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy Map and address data used by Photon and CARTO are sourced from OpenStreetMap contributors (https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright).

NarraFirma is companion software to the textbook Working with Stories in Your Community Or Organization: Participatory Narrative Inquiry. Participatory Narrative Inquiry is a form of Participatory Action Research in which groups of people share and work with their stories of personal experiences to understand each other and to make collective sense of complex issues and situations. You can use it to help the people in your community or organization discover insights, catch emerging trends, make decisions, generate ideas, resolve conflicts, and connect people. What is NarraFirma? It’s a checklist. NarraFirma provides practical guidance as you work, with questions for you to answer, recommendations based on the conditions you describe, activities that help you make decisions, and just-in-time advice. It’s a journal. NarraFirma helps you keep careful records about what happened in your project, and it gives you places to reflect on what happened. This reminds you to keep learning as you work, and it helps you to document your project for future reference. It’s a kiosk. NarraFirma helps you collect stories, on-line and/or off-line, based on question forms you design (with sample questions you can copy). Because story collection is integrated, there is no need to export or import data. It’s a workstation. NarraFirma helps you explore and interpret patterns in your data (stories and answers to questions about stories), creating annotated visualizations you can use to make sense of the stories you collected. Why choose NarraFirma? It’s portable. You can install NarraFirma anywhere, as a WordPress plugin or a Node.js web application. Web hosting is inexpensive, popular, and well supported. You can also install NarraFirma on your local computer and use it off-line. (Whichever installation method you choose, we strongly suggest that you set up SSL security on your web site before collecting or entering confidential or important information. Many hosting providers can help you with this task.) It’s a team player. With NarraFirma your team can work on projects together in real time without having to hand files back and forth. You can plan your project, collect stories, discover patterns, and reflect on what you’ve learned – together. It’s an open book. NarraFirma is open source software. So if you have a question about how something works, you can just look at the source code to find out. If you need the software to do something it can’t do, you can add new functionality yourself or ask someone else to add it. It works in the real world. One NarraFirma installation supports multiple projects, forms, data sets, and reports. Why? Because real-life story projects are rarely simple or predictable. So go ahead and make a mess. NarraFirma is ready for it. Donations We have spent a lot of time developing NarraFirma. We appreciate donations, and will use them to keep working on it. You can donate at PayPal. Need some help? I offer training in the use of NarraFirma and consulting for PNI projects. If you are interested, check out my web site at cfkurtz.com, or send me a note at cfkurtz at cfkurtz dot com.