I'll bite!
The idea is quite good, the practicality of what you'd like to acheive I suspect will be WAY more than you are anticipating judging from the content of your post. For instance, perhaps you are based in South West England, I think you'd need to be making weekly journeys to meet with perhaps chosen 'groups' in each area of the UK you'd like to have these 'communities' in. So travel, hotel, food costs will most likely need to be met by yourself. Logistics of you managing each community will mean perhaps a laptop and mobile internet connection and backup connections for email and perhaps social networking updates. Who'll write, edit, check and publish the weekly updates you mention? yourself means you'll save paying someone to do it, or, if there's not enough time, you'll need to perhaps pay the representative of each region to do something each week - and that'll be very expensive indeed! -perhaps change that to monthly? with the other aspects you are thinking about, I'd say evaluate each one from a logistical and cost point of view.
In all, pretty much everything you mention is in some form already in existence on this site, including face to face meetings when social meetups are arranged. I've even been to a few too! I'd say perhaps look into setting up monthly or quarterly UKY meetups held perhaps in a local hotel for a day or weekend to further your idea...
Cheers, DtM! West London & Slough UK!
