Soloreaper
Maybe we would fund it if we were told what we were funding.
i.e. a development snapshot being given if they could raise a certain amount of funds to increase the "contracted" dev team for a certain period.
How about a bounty system then? Or like a feature 'kickstarter' where a player can post an idea and other players can pledge towards getting that feature coded. The first individual or team to complete it collects the bounty or pledges.
The code could be run through Ryzom Core and thus public and peer-reviewed to prevent bad ideas and poorly coded features from hitting the live game.