A way to get involved into community

[angstrem]

Hello everyone!

I have one non-standard for this forum question.

Programming and Computer Science managed to become my passion, and I'd like to make career in this field. But, unfortunately, it so happened, that now I'm studying in non-technical university, so my fellow student's have nothing to do with programming and computer science in general. This yields one big difficulty for me: I'm unable to constantly stay in contact with people, who share my interests. But this is crucial for further development and building career.

By now, I've made several attempts to solve this problem.
First, I've participated in this forum and one Facebook group of similar destination. Helping newbies with their Java-related questions really helps to refine once skills, but does not yield any community experience (at least, for me).
Second, while taking Machine Learning course on Coursera, I've found on their forum several threads, where people teemed up to work together on certain ML problems. I've registered in 3 or 4 such groups. But seems, that they've been totally inactive for about 2 weeks already.

I believe, that the best community sense can be yielded from some teem work on common problem. I'm highly interested in Java (SE and EE, it's web applications part), Scala (even more than Java), Machine Learning, High-loaded software (parallel computing, you know, I had just a brief introduction, but was excited). But, of course, first two implies, that it would be fun for me to work on pretty much every project who requires programming skills.

I ask for some piece of advice for me: how do I get involved into community of programmers given, that I can do that only via means of Internet? Please, if you have some ideas, let me know, I'll be very grateful!
Thanks.

[Asad Inaam]

Well use the internet to your advantage.Join different forums and social groups on facebook...There are a few highly active ones as well...Try to join one with alot of members...try to form some friendships over the internet with people on the same page as you...Hopefully that could lead to a better comunity feeling....and Best of luck for your future endeavours