consensus isn't needed. Just an option to donate for feature you would like developed. Big, all-encompassing ideas could quite likely attract few donations, whereas specific, feasible, achievable concepts may acquire enough financial leverage to gain actuality.

No harm talking about it, anyway.

Think of it kinda like apps for iphone but the financial side is done in reverse.

Could be revolutionary!

Being linux, as i understand it, a lot of nice features could just be ported? so a $100-$200 feature may well be attractive for some programmer to work on.

Just have a webpage which states requirements of feature, people can donate what they think it is worth (maybe a percentage gets taxed for some good maemo development related purpose (upkeep of donation site or whatever, maybe giveaways or contests for good maemo coding or something)). If project still hasnt happened after so many months you can get your money back (minus tax) or transfer it to different project...

(so, donations are pooled until there is enough incentive for developer/s to provide feature, when they produce and submit code that satisfies feature requirements then they get the pool of money. Mechanics need working out.
Also, anyone should be able to write and submit a feature request, maybe there are 4-5 requests that are similar, that's ok, the poorly written/defined/advertised requests won't attract the same level of donations... maybe have some mechanic for merging requests..).

dunno, just ideas...

(personally i would like to donate, maybe up to $32, towards the design and release of instructions for a home-made n900 serial flash device, I would quite possibly pay again for a nicely built finished product!)

[edit] reading this thread a bit more, and gleaning hints about the implications of the closed source parts of maemo (i don't know much at all) maybe a better direction would be getting meego to run in symbiosis with maemo, ie inside a virtual machine with calls to camera, phone function etc.
...more crazy ideas... *sits down and shuts up for a bit*