If those with ideas and input would show me the way I believe I have the necessary drive and connections to accomplish this.
NChosting, this is a noble aspiration building such a transparent exchange.
I strongly recommend looking at OpenTransactions.
Among the many features of OT there is an under-development feature of voting pool to make it impossible to steal the BTC you are holding as an exchange (this feature has not yet been implemented though).
If you want to know about other OT features which will enable the transparent exchange you are after, please pop in to #opentransactions on freenode.net for a chat.