We've been brainstorming ideas on developing that perfect hacker/developer space, where people curious about programming can come, learn and teach each other. Basically an awesome place where you'd love to hang out and talk about programming.
One of the major long term goals is to develop and foster the developer community in and around this area (Eastern Iowa).
There are collaborative spaces here, but they are mostly focused at growing businesses and entrepreneurship. They are doing a great job with that, but we as developers find the whole ecosystem lacking support to allow developers and the developer community in general to grow.
So far, we have our ideas listed here: https://github.com/verma/iowa-hacker-workshop
Just wanted to put this here and get some feedback, suggestions and general advice.