Analyzing Offline Social Engagements: An Empirical Study of Meetup Events Related to Software Development
Abhishek Sharma, Gede Artha Azriadi Prana, Anamika Sawhney, Nachiappan, Nagappan, and David Lo

TL;DR
This study analyzes the dynamics of Meetup groups related to software development, categorizing events, and examining participation diversity to understand community trends and knowledge-sharing practices.
Contribution
It provides a detailed empirical analysis of Meetup events for software developers, including event categorization, popularity, and diversity insights, which was not previously explored.
Findings
Most popular events are talks, hands-on sessions, and open discussions.
Female participation averages 19.82%, higher than other social media platforms.
Meetup data can reveal emerging topics and community trends.
Abstract
Software developers use a variety of social media channels and tools in order to keep themselves up to date, collaborate with other developers, and find projects to contribute to. Meetup is one of such social media used by software developers to organize community gatherings. Liu et al. characterized Meetup as an event-based social network (EBSN) which contains valuable offline social interactions in addition to online interactions. Recently, Storey et al. found out that Meetup was one of the social channels used by developers. We in this work investigate in detail the dynamics of Meetup groups and events related to software development, which has not been done in any of the previous works. First, we identified 6,317 Meetup groups related to software development and extracted 185,758 events organized by them. Then we took a statistically significant sample of 452 events on which we…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSoftware Engineering Research · Software Engineering Techniques and Practices · Open Source Software Innovations
