Please see
this thread for free and easy software tools that facilitate connections and partnerships between teams over distances via the Internet.
Using these tools in tandem lets any veteran team reach out and provide programming or any other kind of educational assistance to rookie and inexperienced teams without ever leaving the comfort of their shops.
Realtime voice/videoconferencing combined with a powerful remote desktop/file transfer application - I invite you to check these tools out and see what kinds of creative applications you can discover.
Even if you're two veteran teams from the same region who aren't collaborating on a design, using these tools allows you to more easily ping ideas and prototypes off of mentors and students from other local teams - if people can get past the us vs. them competitive mentality and learn to spend more time "talking shop" with other local teams in person and via this software, I believe all the individual robotics programs involved would stand to benefit a great deal.