In late 2008, a founder of FossFactory pitched Collective funding, design and development of Drupal projects to the Marketing of Drupal group on g.d.o. Very much what we are trying to do here. And nothing happened. One significant difference is that they were a for-profit venture. Another difference that shouldn't matter, but we are a tad insular: their site is not Drupal. (It is open sourced and PHP.) The comments to the thread make further points.
The discussion at Module "Black-Hole" revival, especially by dahacouk and myself, predates this and presents clearly the needs we are trying to address.
And the most recent, Supporting Sponsorship for Drupal Contribution, posted in the Prairie Initiative group.
Drupal funding and training initiatives (a listing)
Funding Dojo (a lot of pushback against any focus on money!)
Funding Usability and d.o. Redesign Work
Setting up a dual-purpose dedicated fund?
Fund raiser & community service manager | Drupal associaiton
Drupal sites raising funds/providing resources for Haiti earthquake victims
Marketplace for Module Development and Improvement– pooling resources of developers
BrainStorming about how Drupal is able to "compete" with community product usable out of the box
Structuring and sustaining community-driven projects BoF
Fund the ability to use external URLs with the Audio module -- A successful Chipin!!
DruBB - Proposals, Features and Funding! -- Charity raised (or said was close to raising) the money for this.
More background: http://data.agaric.com/raw/funded-free-software