MeetupNet Dublin: Discovering Communities in Dublin's Meetup Network

TL;DR

This paper constructs and analyzes a co-membership network of Dublin's Meetup groups to uncover hidden community structures and user interests using social network analysis techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to reveal meetup community structures in Dublin by applying social network analysis to co-membership data.

Findings

Identified distinct meetup communities in Dublin.

Revealed underlying interest-based groupings.

Provided insights into user activity patterns.

Abstract

Meetup.com is a global online platform which facilitates the organisation of meetups in different parts of the world. A meetup group typically focuses on one specific topic of interest, such as sports, music, language, or technology. However, many users of this platform attend multiple meetups. On this basis, we can construct a co-membership network for a given location. This network encodes how pairs of meetups are connected to one another via common members. In this work we demonstrate that, by applying techniques from social network analysis to this type of representation, we can reveal the underlying meetup community structure, which is not immediately apparent from the platform's website. Specifically, we map the landscape of Dublin's meetup communities, to explore the interests and activities of meetup.com users in the city.