Thing 6 & 7 - online & face-to-face networks

Over the last few years I have joined a lot of different professional/networking organisations & groups. Partly to help with my continued professional development but also to be able to widen the breadth of my professional knowledge & offer opportunities for me to act as an advocate for the profession & feed my own experiences into national standards & benchmarks.
I am trying to make use of the face-to-face (f2f) features, such as conferences, networking evenings/lunches & professional debate sessions. However, there aren't a lot of local events everything is a minimum of an hrs travel away. Even 'social' evenings can be difficult to attend as my nearest ones are usually London or Bristol & its difficult to finish work, travel down there, attend the event, travel back & find time for anything else that needs doing - like eating. I'm trying to get a social event running in my local area - Swindon - but I'm not sure where to start, has anyone had any experience of this?
Currently I'm very heavily reliant on online newtworks but while they allow me to find a lot of material & to some extent network with other professionals I don't seem to be able to find anything that is trully interactive, i.e. the Special Libraries Association has web courses available to members online but they are built into (& therefore reliant on attendance at) various face-to-face conferences which isn't always practical. A lot of online resources I've come across appear to use fairly 'passive' interactions as well such as Tweeting. I think that although they're very useful in sharing information & beginning to build networks there's not really 'a next step' to move it on to, it's great acquiring lots of knowledge but there has to be a reason for it or something to help direct you to ways of using it.
I've also been conducting exercise to evaluate my memberships in several social & professional organisations/groups in order to assess their benefits em & how I can better use them to continue my professional development.
I won't bore you with all the specifics of this exercise - except to list the groups I'm already a member of, & to ask if anyone knows of any other groups I could join to help me continue to develop my professional skills in the areas of advocacy, strategic planning, management, diversity planning, etc (or any way I could make better use of my existing groups to achieve this).

• CILIP - several groups including CDG; LIRG; PLG; C&IG; RB&SCG
• Special Libraies Association, European Chapter - Education Division; Leadership & Management Division
• Our library also has a shared organisation membership with IFLA, ARA, CILIP, LMLAG, Public Libraries Assoc., & several local heritage forums
• I am also a member of the Oxford University Library Services Chartership Group, as well as their TeachMeet group
• I am a member of our local LGBT community project & the public libraries LGBT in Libraries working group
• I am a member of the NMSI Diversity Panel at work, including being a driver/liaison for the Entrypoints taskforce
• I have online profiles on Facebook, Linkedln, UWE Alumni Association, Twitter, Blogger, as well as being registered on LIS-REG, the CPD23 forum & the CPD25 training forum

I'm particularly interested in becoming more involved in advocacy & developing professional skills & opportunities that would help me to develop my ability to influence policy & strategic planning at both an organisational & national level, as well as develop skills for mentoring /leadership. Any advice very grateful received as I seem to be stuck in a perpetual loop of not being able to get the experience/opportunities I need because I don't have any experience!!!