Great food food for thoughts
luceos who sets the required amount needed to implement said feature/extension?
2 ways: either somebody contact a dev they see fit or people just keep putting money in until they think it's approriate. If a feature/extension raised say 10000 USD so be it.
luceos do you want to pledge to "a feature as an extension" or "a feature for an extension"; aka do you want to attach requests to an existing extension as well?
I think most of the time it should be pretty clear cut. However there are times that it's kind of a grey area as well. I think the dev should make the call in those cases as they see fit because they will be working on it, so they would have a better understanding of the implementation details anyway. From a user perspective (at least in my opinion) I don't really care if it's 1 extension or a combination of extensions that does that trick. I just want the feature to be delivered.
luceos is extiverse allowed to take a percentage (with upper limit) of all pledges to cover costs of running the platform?
I think they should, and this would come with the responsibility of managing conflicts as well. Such as making sure that the dev delivery the minimum requirement or banning dev with bad reputations. Maybe filter out the list of dev beforehand. Devs would need to meet certain requirements before they can take on sizable project etc.
luceos do you pay up front, is the money held up to a specific amount of time or is the money withdrawn when the feature is delivered?
I would say paying up front since the idea is that people chime in as much as they want. No refund once you put your money in.
luceos who decides when the feature is delivered? All backers? What if one or more backers are against pay out?
As mentioned above Extiverse could serve as a mediator. But most of this would built upon trust and reputation. We can learn from Indiegogo or Kickstarter model and implement the same rule. Yes, there will be time that people get scam or things could get ugly but if it's a crowdfund that's the risk most people willing to take
