There is now a Groovy and Grails group here in Austin. I went to the first meeting. I may or may not go to more in the future; it might conflict with the Android group.
The guy who started it has big plans. He eventually wants to put on a Groovy/Grails conference in Austin. He also wants the group to contribute to something to help put Austin on the Groovy/Grails map. Quite a few people suggested improving the documentation for several libraries. I suggested there should be a better tutorial. The Grails site has a link to a PDF file on InfoQ that is a couple of years old and a few versions behind. Grails could use something like the Rails tutorial by Michael Hartl. In the Rails community, you say “Rails tutorial”, and everybody knows what you are talking about.
I also suggested they could make something that allows Groovy to build Android apps, sort of like what RubyMotion does. For some reason, when you mention “Android” and “$SOME LANGUAGE OTHER THAN JAVA”, a lot of people think you mean running that language on an Android device, even if your question is explicitly about using that language to develop applications and you say nothing about running that language on an Android device. I am not clear why that is, or why you would want to run the Groovy shell or the Clojure REPL on an Android device to begin with. If it is impossible for Groovy or Clojure to spit out an Android app, fine. It would be nice if people would say that before talking about running a REPL or shell on the phone.
I mentioned that the amazing Cedric Hurst would be willing to come down and speak sometime. He is very interested in building a strong Groovy/Grails community everywhere.
Image from Aurora Consurgens, a 15th century manuscript housed at Central Library of Zurich. Image from e-Codices. This image is assumed to be allowed under Fair Use.