I meet half of my current core team, buy not building a startup, but by building my local tech community. I started a casual think tank, Fireseedgroup.net to h

I meet half of my current core team, buy not building a startup, but by building my local tech community. I started a casual think tank, Fireseedgroup.net to help focus the community on tech related projects. When barcamps started up, well the Fireseedgroup was there to throw one in Milwaukee. I helped get other communities going. Now we have a lot of interesting things going on. MilwaukeeDevHouse is next weekend, it starts on friday, and its a code party. We have also thought about throwing hackerweekends, and startupweekends. We have a great place to use, bucketworks.org for these events in exchange for helping others with their technology needs. Through the Fireseedgroup name I am always trying to raise money for incubator projects like yCombinator, we would call ours (startupMilwaukee, or M7combinator); and other systems of change. One platform i like is called prize economics. In this system we would use prize money awarded to a themed challenge, like darpa, and the xprize foundation have done. An example is when Milwaukee was trying to get muni-wifi setup, i proposed an option to award a prize for the best ubiquitous web application. I felt that if the prize was $250k or more that hackers would flock to MKE to compete. Have been able to talk to a number of people in MKE about my ideas and have meet with the visitors bureau, the mayor and other law makers. In many cases they get excited but it doesn't go much further. I however get on their call list for ideas and technology. I puts me in an expert position, not from success, but from effort, and powerful people always need someone they can turn to, kinda, like you are looking now. Those network connections are well worth the effort to me to support the community. I have been able to build bridges to our community to companies like MS, Adobe, Google, Yahoo, and nVidia that were not there before. That is powerful stuff.