For this blog’s somewhat unreliable tradition of reflecting on the past year in Central Oregon’s tech scen, I thought I’d take a look at quantitative look at some of our tech meetups. Specifically, I’ve put together an analysis of group membership and activity that may be of interest.
I’m mostly doing this so we have something to compare against in coming years so I don’t know how useful this will be. Regardless, I’ll make a few observations …
BendTech‘s 336 members make it the largest group, although that could simply be because it’s been on Meetup.com the longest (6+ years?) It’s been largely dormant for the last couple of years, however, and only recently has shown signs of renewed life in the form of the StartupWeekend event organized by Alec Campbell (which explains why it shows a respectable amount of activity in the 30, 90, and 365-day activity graphs).
COWPU is the oldest group on the list, but also the smallest, at 54 members. It, too, has been on somewhat of a hiatus, and it’s size is in part due to it only recently being moved to Meetup.com and (I expect) shedding some of the less active members in the process.
The Google Analytics group is run by Theresa Baiocco, a group organizer new to Central Oregon scene. Theresa has been wonderfully active in the community, and also hosts the Web Design & Development group, as well as the Web Marketing group. These groups are all alive and kickin’, and meeting on a regular basis.
Hack Night Bend is still meeting on a semi-weekly / monthly basis.
Finally, the SharePoint group is the one non-meetup.com group on the list. It’s worth mentioning that there’s likely some modest error in determining crossover between this and other groups, but I don’t believe it’s enough to negate the pretty clear conclusion that has a distinctly different audience. Also, we don’t have activity data for this group, which is why it’s a no-show in all the activity graphs.
Other than the SharePoint group, there’s clearly a lot of crossover between groups; 50-80% of any one group can be found in one or more of the others. (There’s an ongoing conversation among the group owners about doing some consolidation. Opinions welcome, btw!)
This is a first pass at this sort of analysis. I hope you find it interesting. Please feel free to add any conclusions or thoughts you might have in the comments. And feel free to suggest other types of analysis you’d like to see.
Props to 
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