A "reverse bounty" is a concept I was discussing at the 2005 Drupal conference. Bounties are a fairly well known concept within the open source world: users post bounties in order that bugs get fixed or features get added.
The main issue with this is that it is user driven, and end users often don't have any concept of how easy or hard something is to implement -- or even what might be possible given the platform.
Reverse bounties are instead posted by developers. It is an idea and feature description of something that the developer actually wants to work on, along with the money required. The developer knows that it can be done, knows what the platform can do, and has the skills to actually implement it. The money allows them to dedicate time to actually work on it.
I wanted to kick off reverse bounties, so I posted on Drupal.org announcing it:
I want to test this model, and have an idea for a small chunk of code. The concept is to simulate adding a password to your .htaccess file, except doing it in PHP directly, and hooking it into the existing Drupal user database. So, you can have a completely private system, and turn this on or off, directly from within Drupal. One of the things that this would also enable is authenticated RSS feeds (secure, too, if you run SSL): by using user:pass@example.com/node/feed you would get all the nodes that your user has permission to see. This would be tremendously useful for private organic group feeds.
Reverse Bounty: Securesite.module
Within hours, I had gotten the first donation: Brady Jarvis of code0range.net. The Donorge.org system (which I'm also trialing) is an open system: you can see all donations. Will this work? Well, it's a bit of a special case. I've also said that Bryght will "top up" the amount required, and ensure that the module gets built.
But don't let that stop you -- donate away!
Update: my story on Drupal.org got promoted to the front page, Dries set up a project on Donorge for Drupal (so securesite now "depends" on it, and is also donating 5% to it). Development Seed made several donations: thanks! Lastly, there is a good discussion about the name of for this concept. Right now I'm favouring "Request for Funding", or RFF.
Oh, and by the way, a little extra incentive: anyone that donates will get a mention and a link directly on the project page, much like the SXIP module.