One of a couple of groups in the Portland, Oregon area, the Personal Telco Project (http://www.personaltelco.net/) is also helping to build community in the Pacific Northwest. Like many of us, the founders are frustrated with exorbitant network access fees and horrifically unresponsive commercial support people. They are specifying a detailed hardware solution for all of their members, making node operation as simple as possible, and building out their network very rapidly.
They host a mailing list and a regular IRC channel ( #personaltelco at irc.openprojects.net), and they were host to the first ever global Wireless Summit meeting (see Chapter 9 for some discussion of the Summit and http://www.personaltelco.net/index.cgi/SummitJune2001 for the online report). Their mailing list has been a great source of information and debate.