My two cents, speaking as a math person, not as a person with any investment in the subject:
The local communities shouldn't be thought of as subsets of the national communities; rather, the local and national communities are both overlapping subsets of all slammers at (registered) venues. What I mean is, there are poets who are distinctly important at the local level, but no one outside their local scene knows them; there are also poets who compete at national events who are virtually non-existant on the local scenes; some people are both but they are not a representative sample, nor should they be used as evidence that the national community is made entirely of local community components.
Since we're talking about a national event, we should be concerned with the national scene, regardless of how important non-national members are at the local level. Personally, I like to think I have a presence on the local scene in the twin cities, but I don't think I've made a huge contribution to the national scene. And I don't think you could argue through degrees of separation that my local contributions are important to the national community.
