• Your KC Bitcoiners Community, Rebuilt From the Ground Up
  • What Is Bodarc?
  • Okay, But What’s “Nostr”?
  • Why Not Just Use Meetup.com?
  • Built by Us, for Us
  • How to Get Started

§Your KC Bitcoiners Community, Rebuilt From the Ground Up

If you’ve been part of the KC Bitcoiners meetup for any length of time, you know the drill: check Meetup.com for the next event, show up, have great conversations, and repeat. It works. But it’s always felt like we were building our community on someone else’s land. Meetup.com can change their rules, raise their prices, or disappear entirely – and we’d have nothing to show for it.

That’s why we built Bodarc, a home base that belongs to us, built by members of this community, for this community. You can find it at kcbitcoiners.com.

§What Is Bodarc?

Bodarc is our own custom-built community platform. Think of it as everything you liked about Meetup.com, but purpose-built for our group – with some important additions that Meetup was never designed to handle.

Here’s what you’ll find there today:

§A Shared Calendar

All of our events show up on the calendar at kcbitcoiners.com/calendar, pulled in automatically from Meetup.com so nothing is lost. But unlike Meetup, our calendar also supports events that only exist on our platform. That means pop-up meetups, private gatherings, and informal hangouts can be listed without needing Meetup.com at all.

You can view events by month, week, or day, and download them straight to your phone’s calendar with one click.

§Education Hub

This is where Bodarc really starts to pull ahead of a generic platform. The Education page is a curated board of resources – articles, podcasts, videos, livestreams, and newsletters – all hand-picked by trusted members of our community.

Instead of everyone individually hunting down good Bitcoin content, we’re pooling our knowledge in one place. If someone finds a great podcast episode about self-custody, or writes up notes from a meetup talk, it goes on the board. Everyone benefits.

We recently added the ability for trusted contributors to publish full-length newsletter articles right on the site. So if you’ve got something to share – a market analysis, a beginner guide, a recap of last week’s meetup – you can write it up and publish it directly to the community.

There’s also a livestream section. If someone in our network is streaming – a roundtable discussion, a market breakdown, even just background music while you work – it shows up automatically on the education page. No hunting through separate apps. It’s just there.

§Vendor Map and Shop

Kansas City has a growing number of businesses that accept Bitcoin, and Bodarc has an interactive map to help you find them. You can see which businesses accept Lightning vs. on-chain payments, filter by category, and get directions right from the site.

Even better, community members can submit new vendors. Found a coffee shop that takes sats? Add it to the map. The more people contribute, the more useful it becomes for everyone.

§Photo Gallery

We’ve all been at meetups where someone says “we should take a group photo” and then it gets posted to five different places and half the group never sees it. The gallery on Bodarc solves that. Anyone who’s logged in can upload photos from meetups and events. They all live in one place, and they’re easy to browse.

§Live Audio Chat

Through a partnership with CornyChat, we’ve embedded a live audio space right into the site. Think of it like a dedicated CB radio channel for KC Bitcoiners. You can jump in before a meetup to coordinate, hang out after to continue a conversation, or just pop in during the week to see who’s around. Your Nostr login carries over automatically – no separate account needed.

§Get Involved

Our “Committees” page shows active committees and volunteer openings within the group. Want to help organize events? Curate educational content? Run our social media? This is where you find out what’s needed and throw your hat in the ring.

§Newsletter Signup

Don’t want to check the website every day? We get it. There’s a newsletter signup right on the home page. Drop your name and email, and we’ll send updates straight to your inbox.

§Okay, But What’s “Nostr”?

You may have noticed we mention Nostr a few times, and if you’re not familiar with it, that’s totally fine. Here’s the short version:

Nostr is a simple, decentralized way to publish and share information online – without relying on any single company or server.

Think of it like this: when you post something on Facebook or Meetup.com, that data lives on their servers. They control it. They can delete it, change the rules, or shut it down. With Nostr, your data lives across a network of independent servers (called “relays”). No single entity controls it. You control your own identity, and your content can’t be taken down or censored by any one company.

We use Nostr under the hood in Bodarc for a few important reasons:

1. Our content belongs to us. Event listings, educational resources, gallery photos, newsletter articles – they all get published to Nostr. Even if kcbitcoiners.com temporarily went down, our data would still exist on the Nostr network.

2. No platform lock-in. Because everything is published using open standards, any other Nostr-compatible app can also read and display our community’s content. We’re not trapped in a walled garden.

3. It aligns with Bitcoin values. Bitcoin is about decentralization – removing middlemen and giving individuals control over their own money. Nostr applies that same philosophy to communication. If you believe in “not your keys, not your coins,” you can probably appreciate “not your server, not your data.”

You don’t need to understand Nostr to use Bodarc. It works quietly in the background. But if you’re curious and want to dig deeper, the education page is a great place to start learning.

§Why Not Just Use Meetup.com?

Meetup.com is fine for discovering events. We still cross-post there. But it was never designed to do what a Bitcoin community actually needs. Here’s the difference:

The bottom line: Meetup.com is a listing service. Bodarc is a community platform. We’re not just announcing events – we’re building an ecosystem of knowledge, connections, and tools that serves our group specifically.

And unlike Meetup.com, which charges organizers hundreds of dollars per year, Bodarc is open source and free to run. Every dollar we don’t spend on platform fees is a dollar that can go toward the things that actually matter – better meetups, better education, and a stronger community.

§Built by Us, for Us

The most exciting thing about Bodarc isn’t any single feature. It’s that this is ours. Every line of code is open source, available on GitHub for anyone to inspect, improve, or adapt. Several members of our community have already contributed – fixing bugs, adding features, and shaping the direction of the platform.

In the last week alone, we merged over 20 improvements: a photo gallery, livestream integration, newsletter publishing, mobile fixes, and a live audio chat embed. That pace of improvement is only possible because we control the platform. Try getting Meetup.com to add a Bitcoin vendor map. We did it in an afternoon.

If you’re technically inclined and want to contribute, check out our GitHub repository. If you’re not technical, that’s perfectly fine too – you can contribute by submitting vendors, uploading photos, writing newsletter articles, or just using the site and telling us what could be better.

§How to Get Started

1. Visit kcbitcoiners.com
2. Browse the calendar to see upcoming events
3. Check out the education page for curated resources
4. Sign up for the newsletter on the home page so you never miss an update
5. Log in with Nostr (or create a key right on the site) if you want to contribute content

That’s it. No credit card. No trial period. No algorithm deciding what you see. Just a community of Bitcoiners in Kansas City, building something worth being part of.

See you at the next meetup. Github Repo