I am in a similar boat (living in China) and HN is really my only way of keeping in touch with the startup/hacker community and "socialising". I really wish there was a IRC channel/website dedicated to people in our situation who are looking to socialise or collaborate together on projects/startups.

I was thinking about this problem recently and one idea that I came up with was to build a "MVP league" that would combine aspects of eSports leagues and online hackatons (e.g. Node Knockout). Participants could form teams and submit a new MVP every X weeks. Another option would be to have theme/technology based tournaments (e.g. "open source", "node.js", "education"). Winners could be selected after each cycle, new teams could be formed, there could be a leaderboard of teams/participants, etc. Sponsors could offer prizes to winners or investors could offer funding.

There are already a couple of websites that aggregate online hackatons (http://challengepost.com, http://www.wehack.it/) but I haven't seen one that operates as a league and most online hackatons are one off things or once a year things.

Curious to hear HN's thoughts...

PS: I added #lfl on Freenode to my auto-join if anyone wants to hang out :)