  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.
