“E-Associations? Using Internet to Connect Citizens: the Case of Meetup.com” by Thomas Sander
Paper Prepared for American Political Science Association Conference, Sept. 2005
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Meetups was in no purely scientific sense random.
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In a few cases we returned to the
same Meetup for the following month’s event to get a sense of how dynamics and
attendance changed from one Meetup to the next.
At each Meetup, the observer noted that he/she wished to observe the Meetup and got the
group’s consent. The observer generally played an inactive role in the Meetup itself, but
recorded information on everything from the group dynamics, to what general topics
were discussed (and whether the group went off-topic together
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), to whether individuals
arrived in groups or left in groups, to how people sat, to whether there was evidence of
group norms, to whether there were introductions, etc.). I believe that nothing reported in
this paper is directly at odds with the ethnographic evidence.
In addition, at the end of each Meetup, the observer asked Meetup attendees to fill out a
one-page survey. We collected 337 survey responses from 37 Meetups and got an 81%
response rate in total and a median response rate by group of 90% (since a few of the
much larger Meetups observed had slightly lower response rates). Almost all of the
discussion in this paper draws from quantitative analyses of these surveys.
The methodology was not specifically designed to test or examine political Meetups.
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After discussing Meetups more generally, I discuss political Meetups specifically. That
said, I believe that if non-political Meetups succeed in building more social capital, it
would naturally have implication for improved political mobilization more generally.
Typology of Meetups
For purposes of analyzing the responses, Meetups were divided into the following 4-fold
typology:
• Hobby/Social (which included Meetups like Anime, Boggle, Pug-owners, Star
Trek, Book Crossing
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, Knitters, etc.)
• Public Purpose/Activist (which included Dean Meetups, Democracy for America,
Kerry Meetups, 9-11 Questions Meetups, Human Rights Campaign, Townhall
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,
Republicans, Nader, etc.)
• Skill-Building
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(which included foreign language speaking groups and Investor’s
Business Daily Meetups)
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For example, one topic that was of interest to us, given that we are based at the John F. Kennedy School
of Government at Harvard was the political/activist meetups which constituted 48% of our respondents and
35% of our Meetups, even though such Meetups account for only 15% of Meetup’s active Meetups. In
general, most of the variation in our Meetup respondents tended to arise from individual-level responses
with some (often on order of 20% of the variation arising from Meetup-level variation). An insignificant
amount of the variation tended to arise from city-level variation.
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Paul Resnick’s criterion for whether online groups are communities is whether they go off-topic together.
27
Some research efforts have focused specifically on measuring political Meetups, see most notably Prof.
Christine William’s effort at Bentley. [http://www.DeanVolunteers.org/Meetup/]
28
Book Crossing concerns “releasing” books into the wild so others can enjoy them and then trying to
make a connection with the readers/finders of these books and encouraging them to in turn release these
books after they are done reading. For more information see www.bookcrossing.com/about
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A Heritage-sponsored conservative group.
Convention