It seems that it's fairly easy if you're recently out of college to find a cofounder and do a startup. However, once you've moved and been in a job for a while, your network dissipates. Would it be interesting to have some community that would allow you, as an employed hacker, to find other hackers to work on side projects with?
The idea here is that people join medium-sized startups to find people to potentially work with on bigger projects. Eventually you can quit your job and go work on the startup full time.
I've thought about putting together an e-mail list of people who want to work on side projects. There are people with ideas, and there are people who just want to join someone and hack on something.
If this seems interesting, how would you structure this? Would an e-mail list be good enough?
I'd just go to local programming meet ups, hackathons, subreddits, github to new a few. Even on the internets I often see Sydney based hackers and it ain't exactly the tech mecca of the world.
I think the relationship is better if you meet in a way where the focus is not on networking but doing something else. The worst meetups are ones designed for networking. I hate those. It is like a shark tank and leads to very stinted conversations in my experience.
An idea for you:
Create impromptu 'popup' 1 hour hackathons. Name a cafe and a time, and anyone who pops up with a laptop you just work on something together, or share ideas or whatever.
You could get the idea started the good old boot-strappy way - set one up in your city every day (Mon-Sun) at a different location, and you and a friend turn up so that if anyone else turns up there will be at least 3 of you so it wont suck.
Make them find you via the website. Then if it catches on and grows add another venue, and you and your friend split up, so now you have two meet ups happening every day. Etc.