Just do it
Shelley Powers: We are out there... i.e., sitting by the phone, waiting for it to ring?
I have a lot of respect for people who do what they can, based on what they know how to do, even if it is suboptimal or even occasionally outright wrong. Clay had a Social Software Summit. Jon Stevens organizes Java Meetups in the Bay Area. Andy Oliver does something similar here in RTP. I hosted the first public SOAPBuilders F2F.
As Shelley points out, this is beyond the means and abilities of many. More importantly however, she demonstrates that a comment enabled weblog is vastly underrated agent for engineering social awareness... a precursor to social change.