There are a lot of programmers in Silicon Valley (and the rest of the world).  Most of them do not work in games.  I’d be willing to wager that a lot of them wouldn’t mind doing a few hours of programming a week on a game project–many of them probably do already. I wonder if the following business model would work:

Take an indie engine like Torque (well, licensing might be a pain on that one…maybe Ogre).  Get a project manager really worth his salt.  Spec out a game on paper (and I mean really spec it out–from story to gameplay to a detailed list of what art assets are required).  Prioritize everything in that spec… and then create a posting system.

This would be similar to something like Google Answers (where you post a question and how much you’re willing to pay for it).  All of the game features would need to be designed as add-on modules which could be completed by a solo programmer.  Not all of the tasks are going to appeal to everyone’s skillset/desires, but there’s a good chance that there’s an engineer somewhere out there who’s either done it before or would be willing to do it for not too much compensation.

Finally, settle on how much cash you’re willing to dole out.  I imagine something like $100 a week would be enough to suck in a bunch of developers (perhaps college and high school students).  This might be enough to cover one or two small engineering tasks a week or one major feature over a couple of weeks.  As the schedule progressed, more and more of this would likely be devoted to art assets (here having a style guide would be pretty important).

$5200 a year sounds like a lot for someone like me, but for a big game company… pennies.  And there’s a pretty good chance that after a few months of this, you’d have a few developers who volunteered again and again–you might even be able to talk them into working on engineering modules for credit alone (after all, they’ve already got a bit invested).

I don’t know if it would work or not…but I definitely think it would work better than hopping on a forum and yelling “Hey I need someone to do this! Want to help out?”