You can always count on HN to find like-minded people. Walked down the same road around 2 years ago. I think if FireChat open-sourced its mesh networking code, we could make some real progress on this. Mostly because writing a mesh networking layer is a project in itself and skipping that would go a long way.

I was thinking of using mesh networking for simple stuff at large events, like locating friends during a music festival (no cell reception).