I'd be very interested to see a group acting as a "liaison" between these communities to help solve problems more efficiently. Example: You're developing a sensor network to measure rain levels across cell phone towers? I have an algorithm that can measure this data effectively and correct for error so you don't have to. We already do this today with the overload of SaaS startups -- you're building some monitoring platform? Use Librato to capture the metrics. You need a disaster response application that can aggregate data and display the most severely affected areas? Use Parse for the backend and OpenStreetMaps for the geo -- no need to do it yourself. If you're solving a problem, there is a 70% chance that somebody either solved it already, is currently trying to, and/or has a good idea about how to solve it. Increase the collaboration to a more personal, local level, and you've got something big.