Analyzing Offline Social Engagements: An Empirical Study of Meetup Events Related to Software Development

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 performed open coding, based on which we were able to develop 9 categories of events (8 main categories + Others). Next, we did a popularity analysis of the categories of events and found that Talks by Domain Experts, Hands-on Sessions, and Open Discussions are the most popular categories of events organized by Meetup groups related to software development. Our findings show that more popular categories are those where developers can learn and gain knowledge. On doing a diversity analysis of Meetup groups we found 19.82% of the members on an average are female, which is a larger proportion as compared to numbers reported in previous studies on other social media. From a broader software development community point of view information from this new forum can be valuable to identify and understand emerging topics and associations among them which can be helpful to identify future trends as well as current best practices.