gathers.us: Why, How and the What
18 May 2010Today we're releasing the initial version of gathers.us! It's not much. I've been calling it an "experiment of experiments." I want to take a moment to talk a little about what we're doing here, explain a little bit why we're doing what we're doing and how we plan to move forward with gathers.us.
Why
Our problem arose as fellow Obtivian, Ethan Gunderson, and I decided to start up our own user group in Chicago on the topic of database tools and practices. User groups in the software development community generally start out as small get togethers of like-minded folk trying to reach a shared goal of understanding whatever they are talking about and learning from others. There are usually no membership fees, and the only reason one even needs RSVPs is to try to plan how much pizza to buy or get a list of attendees to building security for entry. Discussion is usually held via email, using something simple (and free) like Google Groups. Unfortunately for us, the products that are out there cost money and are, in our opinion, extremely bloated for what we need.
Me, being the way I am, expressed this pain outwardly while at work in the Obtiva main office. "We should build our own event management site," I said part joking the Ethan. But Ethan, being the straight shooter he is, replied, "Let's do it then. Put some ideas down in Pivotal Tracker and start coding." Another officemate, Jim Breen, caught wind of my whining as well. Turns out he's been looking for something similar to help manage another local user group. Jim joined the team and we were ready to start pushing forward on this project.
How
At Obtiva we have be talking about lean startups, and how we could experiment with our processes to make us better consultants to entrepreneurs. This was our chance to give some of those ideas a shot. We sat down for lunch later that week to flesh out the minimum viable product of what was to be gathers.us. Peeling and stripping away all the initially wasteful features from our product, we tried to strike at what was the essence of gathers.us; the smallest feature set that we could build and verify with our potential customers.
We've even taken our experimentation to the technical side of the project. We're all building our first Rails 3 application using Rails 3 beta 3 and Bundler. For data persistence we're using MongoDB through MongoHQ and, for now, we're rolling our own object-persistence layer using the mongo-ruby-driver and a little help from Rails 3's ActiveModel. Last we're trying something a bit heretical: we've decided to forgo unit testing and focus on testing at the integration/acceptance level with Cucumber/Capybara. We're going to try to keep it that way as long as possible without introducing significant bugs or sacrificing decent design. Don't worry, we'll blog about this later.
What
The idea of gathers.us means a couple things for us. First, gathers.us is simple. It should offer the simplest way to get your event started, spread the word, and enable you to connect with like-minded people. We'll add more features in the future as we feel the pull from our customers. For now, you don't need a user account to create events on gathers.us. Just some information about you, the organizer, and your event. Your attendees need no account either.
Second, gathers.us is community-driven and focused. We're taking a cue from a really cool startup called Github: if your event is completely public and is not charging for attendance, it will be free to create your event on gathers.us. Local user groups are near to our hearts, so helping foster these kinds of communities is important to us. We'll also be listening closely to what features are important to user groups, and try to find ways to continue to make it simple and cheap to organize events.
Gather!
Getting to the point of being releasable has been very rewarding. Slimming down our MVP, we are able to give you what we have today in less than 15 hrs worth of developer time. Really, most of that time has been spent reviving my web designer skills. Yet we're able to give you a product that we're proud of and represents the start of what we hope will be come a rich experience for community-driven event management. Very exciting.
That's it. Kick the tires and light the fires! Create a new event and tell us what you think. We'd love to hear from you. We hope you love hearing from us too, because we plan to keep you posted here with new developments about features, as well as our experimentations in process and technology. Go forth and meet!
Ryan Briones - @ryanbriones