Collaboration is the glue that sticks people and organisations together.

It helps build connections based on shared objectives, views, or missions. While critical to the success of the tech ecosystem, it is difficult to pin down through official data.

The diagram below shows the national network of informal industry meetups. Tech meetup groups within these ecosystems are grouped, not by geography, but by their shared specialisms – the more similar the tags used to describe them, the closer they are on the network diagram.

This shows how informal industry meetups underpin the UK tech ecosystem and indicate emerging economic activity. This vibrant grassroots tech scene is essential to maintaining and sustaining growth.

If informal industry meetups hint at economic undercurrents, then formal events bring existing economic activity to the surface. They are opportunities for tech communities to engage over shared interests. As such, they also strengthen these communities, since cultures are built, at least in part, on shared experiences.

Formal tech events are also bringing the tech community together in a public, structured way that validates these grassroots connections. The UK’s well-developed network of formal events illustrates the presence of a balanced tech ecosystem.

The largest tech meetup groups are in London, in fact of the 400 largest in the diagram, 323 are based in the capital. This might reflect a number of factors, such as the large resident and working population in the city. It may also show a critical mass of connected organisations that are well placed to arrange and run meetup groups, as well as the local and global connectedness of London. As such,  not every member of meetup groups in London are Londoners. Across the UK, tech meetups are inclusive and porous, as illustrated by the fact that 91% of groups are open for anyone to attend, 9% require approval and only one group is closed.

UK software developers are highly collaborative

What language do you code in? Explore the top languages, toggle through labels and drag a box over the chart to zoom in. 

Top programming languages used on Github

Source: Tech Nation, 2018; Github, 2018

Notes: This chart uses data on the repos of top UK users, and to identify developers’ main programming languages based on the distribution of lines of code they have contributed.

Software innovation is critical to the success of the UK digital tech sector, yet how developers collaborate is seldom captured. We examined the language of online collaborations, as well as the activities of Github super users, to create a clearer picture of this community. We found that the top three languages among users, are JavaScript, Python and PHP.

The connections that users make on Github are best illustrated through the code that they co-create. As a project is developed, Github stores and manages the revisions that people make to projects.

For productive connections to be forged, collaborators must be able to communicate effectively. In the case of development, this is not necessarily a question of speaking the same language, but of coding in the same language.

GitHub opens up a new world of collaboration. No longer are developers confined to working with people who talk or write the same old world languages. JavaScript and Python are the new lingua franca – everyone can be involved. Tech communities are capitalising on this opportunity, riding this global wave of open, inclusive innovation.

Read next