I am in a similar boat (living in China) and HN is really my only way of keeping in touch with the startup/hacker community and "socialising". I really wish there was a IRC channel/website dedicated to people in our situation who are looking to socialise or collaborate together on projects/startups.
I was thinking about this problem recently and one idea that I came up with was to build a "MVP league" that would combine aspects of eSports leagues and online hackatons (e.g. Node Knockout). Participants could form teams and submit a new MVP every X weeks. Another option would be to have theme/technology based tournaments (e.g. "open source", "node.js", "education"). Winners could be selected after each cycle, new teams could be formed, there could be a leaderboard of teams/participants, etc. Sponsors could offer prizes to winners or investors could offer funding.
There are already a couple of websites that aggregate online hackatons (http://challengepost.com, http://www.wehack.it/) but I haven't seen one that operates as a league and most online hackatons are one off things or once a year things.
Curious to hear HN's thoughts...
PS: I added #lfl on Freenode to my auto-join if anyone wants to hang out :)
There is #startups in freenode, and there are lots of programming channels, and if you hang in them long enough you can start socializing with folks in there.
our two man team is random. Some guy joined me for the hackathon, because he hadn't got idea what to do and he was following me in Twitter and read my ask for help.
I was thinking about this problem recently and one idea that I came up with was to build a "MVP league" that would combine aspects of eSports leagues and online hackatons (e.g. Node Knockout). Participants could form teams and submit a new MVP every X weeks. Another option would be to have theme/technology based tournaments (e.g. "open source", "node.js", "education"). Winners could be selected after each cycle, new teams could be formed, there could be a leaderboard of teams/participants, etc. Sponsors could offer prizes to winners or investors could offer funding.
There are already a couple of websites that aggregate online hackatons (http://challengepost.com, http://www.wehack.it/) but I haven't seen one that operates as a league and most online hackatons are one off things or once a year things.
Curious to hear HN's thoughts...
PS: I added #lfl on Freenode to my auto-join if anyone wants to hang out :)