Analyzing offline social engagements: an empirical study of meetup events related to software development

• Main Authors: SHARMA, Abhishek, PRANA, Gede Artha Azriadi, SAWHNEY, Anamika, NAGAPPAN, Nachiappan, LO, David
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2022
• Subjects: Computer and Systems Architecture; Computer Sciences; Databases and Information Systems; Information Security
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/7652; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/8655/viewcontent/Analyzing_offline_social_engagements_an_empirical_study_of_meetup_events_related_to_software_development.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Software developers use a variety of social mediachannels and tools in order to keep themselves up to date,collaborate with other developers, and find projects to contributeto. Meetup is one of such social media used by softwaredevelopers to organize community gatherings. We in this work,investigate the dynamics of Meetup groups and events relatedto software development. Our work is different from previouswork as we focus on the actual event and group data that wascollected using Meetup API.In this work, we performed an empirical study of eventsand groups present on Meetup which are related to softwaredevelopment. First, we identified 6,327 Meetup groups related tosoftware development and extracted 250,36 9 events organizedby them. Then we took a sample of 452 events on which weperformed open coding, based on which we were able to develop9 categories of events (8 main categories +“Others”). Next, wedid a popularity analysis of the categories of events and foundthat Talks by Domain Experts, Hands-on Sessions, and OpenDiscussions are the most popular categories of events organizedby Meetup groups related to software development. Our findingsshow that more popular categories are those where developerscan learn and gain knowledge. On doing a diversity analysis ofMeetup groups we found 20.46% of the members on average arefemale, and 20.34% of the actual event participants are female,which is a larger proportion as compared to numbers reported inprevious studies on gender representation in software engineeringcommunities. We also found evidence that the gender of Meetupgroup organizer affects gender distribution of group membersand event participants. Finally, we also looked at some data onhow COVID-19 has affected the Meetup activity and found thatthe event activity has dropped, but not stalled. A substantialnumber of events are now being organized virtually. The resultsand insights uncovered in our work can guide future studiesrelated to software communities, groups, and diversity-relatedstudies.