Enhancing Online Community Building & Long-Term Production with Co-Located Events

Nearly all online communities organize co-located meetings, such as conferences, un-conferences, and hackathons. These events are short, fast-paced, yet they are intended to enable social interactions and fast-circulation of informal knowledge between attendants. There is however a dearth of knowledge on the contribution of co-located events to community enhancement and long-term online production. Here, I study a community of astrophysicists involved in open and reproducible data science. Over the span of data collected (4 years), five co-located meetings were organized. Each meeting triggered contrasted immediate effects regarding collaboration, but all of them had significant long-term enhancing effects on community building and online knowledge production. These results illustrate how punctual co-located meetings change the way contributors engage with their community once they have resumed their routine work online.