I was waiting a long time to see projects like this popping up: soprani.ca
Chris linked and article that describes the basic idea behind building a privacy-respecting decentralized cellular network. I do like this idea a lot.
Modern mobiles are the greatest surveillance tools ever made. Sensitive data and metadata is published via the cellular network (your location), mobile operating systems of cloud vendors (iOS, Android), and a broad variety of mobile apps that do not respect your privacy. On the one hand side, there is the credo "money talks" and on the other hand side politicians make laws that do target us, not only the bad guys. Agencies do whatever they want, independent of ethics, laws or regulations. The recent years have proven this far better than anybody would have anticipated.
In case you don't want to be spied on to this great extend, you can use old fashioned phones. Users of Android may use open source Android forks, avoid cloud-related apps or services, and switch to strong end-to-end cryptography for messaging and calls. However, this doesn't avoid the leakage of your position.
Therefore, an important thing to have is a trustworthy, encrypted communication path while being off-WiFi. What Freifunk did for WiFi, sprani.ca is trying to accomplish for cellular networks.
I would love to see this or a similar project gaining support.