The Terminodes project is designing a wide area, mobile ad-hoc network, which is meant to be used in a public environment, in our approach, the network is run by users themselves. We give a global description of the building blocks used by the basic operation of the network, they all rely on various concepts of self-organization. Routing uses a combination of geography-based information and local, MANET-like protocols. Terminode positioning is obtained either by GPS, or by a relative positioning method. Mobility management uses self-organized virtual regions. Terminodes employ a form of virtual money called ``nuglets