The Desire To Mingle

I live in Pittsburgh, it's an odd place and this opinion strengthens the longer I live here. It's a city full of great universities but yet clings desperately to it's long dead industrial blue color history. This seems to me to almost create a them and us feel to the city. You are either a working resident of this city or you are part of the schools and the two don't seem to mix well. This becomes a problem for me because of my interest and hobbies. I spend my free time tinkering and playing around with technology of all forms: programming, networking, robots, electronics, the list goes on. I would love to find people to work on this kind of stuff with and trade knowledge. I read about the goings on in other cities with Make groups, the NYC Resistor group, the 2600 meetings, or Dorkbot. But look at what Pittsburgh has, from what I can find we have Dorkbot and that's it. But the events going on at Dorkbot here have yet to peak my interest into going and they have been few and far between since I moved here. They even took off the entire summer plus because apparently most of the attendees are connected to the universities. Now if there are any Pittsburgh Dorkbot alum reading this I'm not dissing your group and have no right to since I've yet to go to one of your meetings, I'm just saying that while other groups are doing circuit bending labs you are having lectures on how to get funding for your software start up. Useful and interesting but not as much fun or hands on.

So why is it that the city that has been dubbed Roboburgh doesn't seem to have a group of people looking to work together and share ideas?