I don't have a concrete concept yet. Right now it's more like a poll, to check how big the potential is. I want to see, how many "serious" merchants are we, who would invest 50$ (or more) into this project.
A rough idea is like this. We actually still use a crowdfunding project and bring back the feature request, but with incentives.
Golden Supporter with at least 50$/month can add features request and vote for feature request.
Normal Supporter below 50$/month can vote for feature request.
Non supporter will have access to full open source code, but they won't have any influence in the direction of the project.
For this to be happen, the pool of golden supporter have to be big enough. So we can hire good devs like (Petr or Markus) for the jobs. That's why I now want to check the potential.
This won't be easy at all and won't solve all problems, but maybe it brings some life back. Problems I see:
Feature requests vary a lot. Golden Supporters have to "organize" their ideas. Which issues do we all have and which issues are just issues for 1 merchant.
Feature requests need to be concrete. It won't be enough to say: "Stock management is bad. Make it better.". The devs need to exactly now, what we expect from them.
This voting system / feature request system won't come from god...
Feedbacks on the idea are welcome.