I agree with Jason's point out “be loud”. I also do think the angel community is a huge gap. For those of us who know angels, we need to find ways to pull them together and make them more visible. That matchmaking is very difficult for young entrepreneurs who tend not to know the (typically older) angels through natural social circles. We started StayinMA to assist with this natural networking for students at conferences and industry cofabs, but more can be done here.

Keep up the rabble rousing!

But let's put all this nonsense aside. I want DogPatch to prosper. It's a resource for entrepreneurs. However, what I also want is something that better caters to new entrepreneurs and those with little resources at the time: even entrepreneurs that are still drawing diagrams on whiteboards and writing down ideas on napkins or just starting to find their way around the landscape. What entrepreneurs need to do is plant a flag in the middle of Boston and say, “we're here, we're badass, and we're doing it big.” People on the fringes will hear it and join in. Things still aren't loud enough, and what we need is to get to ***critical mass*** and have entrepreneurs bumping into entrepreneurs.

And as you said, once there are some homerun hitters that invest back in the region, we'll be on our way. But, it takes a lot of failures to get it right and it takes activation energy from the ecosystem to get there.

I agree with your uber-point though. More collaboration that is
consistent is better. But it's often hard to fabricate this stuff,
and each one of these initiatives do help, but don't go all the way.

1) Events aren't designed for knowledge transfer. They're best for meeting new people. Sure, you'll pick up something new. You can also follow up with someone and schedule a meeting (which are costly). But there are 1000s of questions a new entrepreneur needs answered and will run into. Maybe a few things can be learned from a meeting. The real learning comes from working around people that are very close to your current situation that you can turn to and say, “how did you handle this?”. In Boston, you don't bump into someone in your daily routine and talk about founder issues.

It's easy to forget the what it's really like to be completely new to something and know *nothing*. Invaluable mentorship comes from your peers.
Here's another side to this that comes from a comment above by bsrubin, “I am super-willing to mentor – but no one (except for a few Brown grads – my alma-mater) knows how to find me.”

2) These events aren't very helpful for getting new people into the “entrepreneurial funnel.” They offer a chance for the current community to get together. If you go to these events, you start seeing the same faces. (there are some events that are much better suited for getting new people into the entrepreneurial arena).

People are starting to realize there is real opportunity in Boston waiting to be tapped, but it's going to require investment in growing the community. What I'm proposing is a location/community that exists continually that specializes in the difficult transition process of going from a dorm room or job into the wild. Boston's problem is that entrepreneurial people often don't make it into the funnel, or can't get through those very difficult initial steps that a “zero stage” entrepreneur goes through.

3) In the day-to-day life of a zero-stage entrepreneur, events don't supply the moral support and energy that can make a huge difference. Having a real working community can really help push things forward. YC and TechStars display this and are the closest examples to what I'm proposing, but in the Boston environment, we need something more persistent.

Hmm, this comments has gotten longer than I'd like, so I'll stop there.

Does this illustrate why these forms of community building fail in certain areas?
I think it's also important to remember that founding a company and working in a startup with some momentum are also very different.