An example is that one of the core gimp dev's has been having a try;
he does gimp part time and works as a paid developer on other
projects the rest of the time. In this case, the idea is for him to
be able to devote more of his time to gimp by replacing some of his
paid work with crowd-funded work - its a win/win situation really.
The main problem with the gimp project was that the developer chose
a feature that was not especially popular, so with InkScape, I
thought it would be a good idea to ask people first and to give the
dev's some ideas as to which thinks people are really excited about.
My involvement, by the way, is that of a "connector" - an idea the
open funding people are working on, where Free Software people
(users/advocates/developers etc) who have community/marketing/design
skills can help developers with presentation, videos, social media
when they want to crowd-fund a feature.
In general, I am now doing my "connector" role only within
communities I know really well. With InkScape, while there have been
loads and loads of replies from users with ideas, I have had very
little response from the developers and I don't know any of them
personally. I would love it if some of these ideas that would
otherwise not get made, could get crowd-funded into being :)