Henning wrote: An “Open Science” group is being founded in Chicago:
http://chiopensci.wordpress.com/about/
By someone who is building a scanning tunneling microscope:
http://www.chemhacker.com/
As focus fusion is somewhat of an open science project, this might be a good place for interested people living in and around Chicago to turn to.
It is still in its founding phase though.
We can learn from their approach, starting with a clean looking page that qualifies people by sub-interest. This ties in with what Emmetb posted about building the FF brand and using AdSense for monetization. But since Chicago’s only about a 5 hr drive from here in West Michigan, I’m kind of wondering about how global their thinking is at the moment.