I would guess that most meetups are of the community-oriented type, and I think this is good -- otherwise busy people would completely stop attending the meetups.

But there is an opportunity to explicitly create an outcome-oriented subgroup at the meetup. Ask people how many of them are willing to invest at least X hours (beware the planning fallacy) between now and the following meetup to participate on a group project. Then take these people aside and select a project that could be done with the available energy (again, beware the planning fallacy). Precommit to present your results publicly during the following meetup. Collect e-mails. Then use your rationality skills towards the outcome: plan specific tasks; track spent time using pomodoros in a shared document. Report in LW group diary when finished.