It's certainly good to trade and to help each other. I did start
a thread about meetups quite recently. I discussed with Garth and we thought we'd see how it goes - it might, or might not, be appropriate to make it sticky. (We don't want too many sticky threads.)
Arguably there's a chicken-and-egg here. I think Mike's preference is first to see if the content is there. IIRC, the two most-recently created forums are the Forth one (created 2004), and more recently the Programmable Logic one (created 2010). They've had one or two hundred threads, which shows that the interest was there.