Thanks for responding. It's great to hear from someone who has some first hand experience with this process. It looks like you are running a cool organization over there.

Hackerspaces.org has been a helpful resource for me as I was researching this over the last week. I encourage anyone else who is interested in it to check out some of their awesome projects to see what is possible.

My goal would be to have a serious capital injection to start this off. I don't know where it is going to come from, but I am seriously looking into government grants. I don't know what kind of strings will come attached yet, and it sickens my inner objectivist, but it seems like a great match for this kind of organization. BC happens to have a whole range of accessible grants, from the arts to small business to tech. Maybe it will be too much hassle, but it solves the problem of seed capital.