An Examination of Information Technology Meetups

This study grew out of the Amazon announcement in 2017 that it would create a second headquarters with most of the competing cities being located in the East-Midwest section of the United States. The city of Cincinnati threw in its hat as did another 237 cities. Cincinnati was eventually eliminated in part because “it was not technical” enough according to Amazon. Eventually, Amazon had narrowed down the 238 “contestants” to 20 with Columbus being the only Ohio city in the running. Part of my research has been on the information technology community within the Cincinnati area [1] and this got me wondering “just how does Cincinnati compare to other cities.” This study looks at cities within 1000km radius of Cincinnati and measures the number of tech meetups found on Meetup.com. This study was also an excellent exercise in the use of several technologies to fetch the data, prep the data, and analyze the data.  Power BI, Excel, and SQL Server were used in this exercise.

Russell McMahon has been teaching Information Technology related subject matter since 1980 and has been a faculty member at the University of Cincinnati since 1999. In 2014, he took a 6-month sabbatical to work at 3 universities in 3 different countries in Africa. He is very active in the IT-related user group community having served on the boards of multiple groups. He recently worked at Miras University in Kazakhstan as a Fulbright Specialist help their computing faculty with their technical English skills. This past September, he was a keynote speaker at a computing education conference in Lima, Peru.

Pizza, drinks and conversation will follow our speaker!