I'd really like to find some local hackers/coders who would enjoy hanging out and hacking on small, fun projects for an afternoon or a day. I have a bunch of things I think would be fun, but I'm not super particular and expect everybody I find will also have project ideas (although interesting/fun/intellectually stimulating is important). Meeting people, having a good time, and learning stuff in a hands on fashion is the primary goal. I'd like to do this regularly (say once a week), but I would expect most people to be interested in only a subset of the projects. Ideally then I'm looking for maybe 20 people with lots of different experience levels across a wide array of technologies, so one or two people would be interested any given week.

Things I'm considering: 1) Craigslist. Geared for finding people locally, it works well for musicians, but I've never had responses for anything else. 2) Meetup.com. These tend to be focused on 1 technology, they meet infrequently, they tend to be lecture oriented rather than hands on hacking, they tend to have lots of people, and without a corporate sponsor they tend to go nowhere. This seems like a bad fit. 3) LinkedIn. Paying for the kind of LinkedIn account that recruiters use seems promising. It costs money, but lets me search locally by interest/skill set. It requires me to send "cold call" emails, but since I'm not hiring or selling anything, I'm not worried. It's just a lot of work; I'd have to send out hundreds or maybe a thousand emails.

I'm in SoCal, Hollywood area. There may be local services I'm completely unaware of. So anything I'm missing, other services I should try?