I have analyzed all the Python user groups

PUG = Python User Group

Recently, a coworker approached me and asked if I’d be interested in going to Krakow, a city located 90km (56miles) away from my place, to attend a local Python meetup. While it does sound like fun, I’d prefer to attend a similar event that’s closer to home. I recalled that PySilesia used to be organized in Katowice, the city where I reside, but it appears to have been inactive for the past few years.

I began searching on Google and discovered that the official Python website has a section dedicated to listing local user groups (https://wiki.python.org/moin/LocalUserGroups). While I understand that this list may not be exhaustive, it provides a great starting point. It’s worth noting that some recently established Python user groups may not be included yet. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any active PUGs in my city.

Out of curiosity, I decided to explore PUGs from other countries. To my surprise, I encountered a graveyard of inactive websites. Many of the domains were either dead or returned 404 errors. Some claimed to be country-wide user groups, which didn’t quite align with the term “LocalUserGroups” as the URL suggests. Others redirected to personal blogs, company websites, news sites, or even casinos.

After painstakingly opening all 324 links that I had scraped from the site, I discovered that only 59 of them were still active.

59 / 324 = 18.2% meetups were alive

The ones that are still alive, are

As you can observe, the majority of these groups utilize meetup.com as their platform for organizing and coordinating events. While this choice offers easier discoverability, it presents a significant barrier for hobbyist PUGs. Not only do they have to find speakers, arrange a venue, and engage in basic promotion, but now they are also expected to bear the financial burden? That’s certainly discouraging.

I’m delighted to introduce you to pythonuser.group. This platform is designed exclusively for the requirements of local Python user groups, and it’s completely free to use. The best part is that even if you decide to discontinue you local PUG, your data will remain intact.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me via email at pug [at] tomwojcik.com.

The data was fetched with

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
import pandas as pd
import sqlite3

URL = "https://wiki.python.org/moin/LocalUserGroups"

response = requests.get(URL)

soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content, "html.parser")
pug_tags = soup.find_all('a', {'class': 'http'})
d = [
    {'url': tag.attrs['href'], 'name': tag.text, 'is_alive': False}
    for tag in pug_tags
]
df = pd.DataFrame(d)
df.to_csv('data.csv', index=False)

database = "data.sqlite"
conn = sqlite3.connect(database)
df.to_sql(name='data', con=conn)
conn.close()

and is available at https://tomwojcik.com/pug_data.csv