I'd like to contribute somehow as well, although probably with the later stages such after the initial prototypes have been built, as I don't have as much FPGA experience as others here.
You said you might need people for "general support" roles, I'd be willing to help however I can.
I spent a few school semesters doing VHDL on a Xilinx board, so I have general working knowledge of how everything operates, I'm decent with C/C++, networking, etc - so just let me know if and how I can help out. Maybe after you have a prototype designed and plans put out onto the internet I can download them and attempt assembling one and give you detailed feedback.
I hope this project gets going quickly and actually succeeds at making working prototypes, sounds very fun!
I'm planning on trying to avoid FPGAs just because of expense though it's possible that one will end up as the control chip.