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Drafted based on Quincy Larson's comment on Oct 17, 2019.
As of 2019, managing an organization with local chapters is still a pain.
freeCodeCamp has dozens of active chapters around the world. These chapters have regular events with large turnout. But they're organized using a mish-mash of Meetup.com groups, Facebook groups, and WeChat groups.
Meetup.com is expensive. With Facebook and WeChat, it's hard to reliably reach your own group members.
All three of these tools require you to share your community's data with third parties.
And none of these platforms offer a good way to get your member's email addresses so you can migrate to a new platform. Instead, Meetup, Facebook, and WeChat try and lock you into their platform.
These platforms do serve two major purposes, though:
Purpose #1: They can help you publicize your events and organically draw in participants from the platform at large.
This is thanks to these platforms' social network monopoly effects. In social, the winner takes all. And these platforms are the winners.
Purpose #2: They give you convenient tools for creating events, managing RSVPs, and sending updates to your participants.
Chapter will have these features. But instead of serving as a one-size-fits-all solution, Chapter will be designed specifically for multi-chapter organizations.
Chapter is a self-hosted chapter management tool. It is a "Meetup in a box" for your organization's chapters and events.
Here's how Chapter works.
Chapter can live on a Linux server anywhere - Google, Amazon, Azure, other cloud providers, or even your own personal server room.
A cloud server capable of running Chapter should only cost your organization US $20 to $40 per month.
Then you can just paste the server's IP address into your browser's address bar.
You can set up Chapter through its in-browser admin panel. There's no need to dig around in a codebase or a command line interface.
You can run Chapter on a subdomain of your organization's website. For example, https://chapter.freecodecamp.org or https://events.freecodecamp.org.
Chapter has a well-documented API. So if you want, your team can integrate your chapters and events into other parts of your website or mobile app.
Chapter gives you the flexibility to structure your chapters however best suits your organization.
You can add country-level chapters, state/province-level chapters, city-level chapters, or even neighborhood-level chapters.
You can add as many chapters as you want to each region.
Each of your chapters can include photos and videos from past events, social media links, and other details to entice people to its events.
Each chapter can have sub-chapters. For example, your California chapter might have a Los Angeles sub-chapter. And Los Angeles might have a Hollywood sub-chapter. And Hollywood might have a West Hollywood sub-chapter.
This makes it easy for participants to understand the subchapters and where they fit into your larger organization. It also makes it easy to invite the right people to larger regional events.
Your leaders can help customize your chapters and add details for local events.
Each chapter can have as many leaders as you want. Each leader can add their own title, bio, social media links, and contact information.
Each of your chapters has its own events calendar. You can set up an event in seconds. Just add a name, time, location, and any special instructions you have for participants.
You can have as many events as you want. You can even set up recurring events.
Participants can RSVP for these events. They can then one-click-add these events to their calendar tool of choice.
As of 2019, email is still the most reliable way to reach most people.
When a participant registers for a chapter's events, they can get added to that chapter's email list. You can also automatically add them to other email lists, like your organization's master mailing list.
Chapter will send out emails to people when they register, when they RVSP for events. It will also remind them of upcoming events they've registered for.
You can grant leaders the ability to send emails to their chapter's participants as well.
You can configure all of this. And you have full access to the mailing lists and the full database.
Tools like Meetup.com, Facebook Groups, and WeChat Groups don't actually let you get your members' email addresses. They force you to communicate with your members through their own messaging tools.
At any point, those organizations can make decisions against your interest. They can send their own messages that contradict you. They can - and often do - get hacked. And you may not even realize any of this is happening.
And worse of all, when it comes time to move off of those platforms, all you can do is tell people "hey - go over here" and hope that they go.
In other words, you're building your castle on somebody else's land.
Contrast this with Chapter. With Chapter, you own everything. All your data stays in your database on your server. Your data doesn't go anywhere you don't tell it to go.
You can customize the way your instance of Chapter looks, feels, and functions.
Chapter has the most permissive open source license available. This means that if you want to, you can even dive into the codebase itself and change the very fundamentals of how your Chapter server works.
You can host thousands of chapters on a single server. You can have millions of people RSVP for events each month without needing to significantly increase your server size.
Yes. We are building it so our nonprofit can use it. Some other nonprofits are using it to. It's not limited to nonprofits, of course. Anyone can use it for free.
There is no paid tier. There are no advertisements. Your organization gets the same tool we're using.
At this time, we can't enter into any contracts around this. You can create issues and request features, and our project contributors will help as much as we can.
If your organization has developers, we would welcome their open source contributions to the project as well.
Chapter is built using popular and time-tested open source tools like Node.js, React, SQL, and Docker.
If you don't have chapters yet, we recommend starting with some of the social network event tools. This will also help people discover your event.
Chapter is designed more for organizations that already have existing participants in their events, and existing awareness of their communities.
We are exploring ways that smaller organizations could band together to have shared event directories. This isn't part of Chapter's initial release.
Chapter is optimized for search. Particularly Google search and Google location search.
This said, Chapter isn't magic. You will still need to publicize your events and raise awareness of your Chapter with your existing members.
Yes. You can replace the Chapter logo - and logos in emails - with a logo for your own organization.
Currently Chapter has no payment functionality. We may add an option for this in future versions.
You will need to add an email service to Chapter. Popular options include Amazon SES, SendGrid, and Mandrill. These have a small cost per email. Amazon SES, for example, costs $1 per every 10,000 emails sent.
We don't have a hard launch date, but we are working as fast as we can toward a stable release.