+1 It would definitely be; the grass-roots self-organizing meet up here in San Diego has been gaining real traction (market's pulling for this! at least a small niche community). Our most recent 4th meet up saw 16-17 people, with about 40% of new faces who heard about it on HN the very same day - and I suspect we would have a higher turnout if the SD HN meet up announcement wasn't only on the front page for a few seconds. If the regulars showed up this previous time, we would have easily had ~25 people.

Knowing that there is a meet up in your location is the #1 problem; so it's a problem of discovery. If you can help with discoverability, then everything else becomes less of an issue. Adding each other on Facebook/Twitter, using a Google groups email list, setting up a basic page for the meet up etc. is a non-issue.

At least, "physical" issues HN can't solve ;) Like, our group now hangs out from 7+pm all the way until midnight, and many business owners prefer we don't hog their space on a Friday since it's a busy time for them.

Maybe we could try to bum some free space from big businesses. Some of us who have corporate day jobs may try to get HR depts to approve the using of one of the business meeting rooms, etc. Corporations do this all the time for non-profits and techie events.

For SD HN, aside from the obvious, like somewhere not too noisy and can fit the size of the crowd, we prefer somewhere that at least provides wireless, electricity is a plus (so that people can show off their work, demo stuff and get feedback)