The arbiter. you're putting all your trust in whoever is selected as the "arbiter"/escrow. no different than any other charity that decides when and where to deploy money, when to re-up, what gets built, etc.
the crowdfund zaps go to the arbiter, who just holds the money ("escrow"). when the work is submitted, the arbiter either sends the money to the worker or refunds it all to the funders if the work was bad (or if the work is good but they're a psychopath or a troll. but you're not going to get very far as an arbiter if you can't be trusted. and considering it's a paying job, you might want to be good at it)
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...i say "no different than any other charity"... except it also couldn't be more different. There is next to zero middleman involved here. There's _nothing_ stopping the OSS team from being its own arbiter. As long as the funders trust the team enough to not rug them, this would mean 2 of the 3 roles are played by the developers, and the last role is played by the funder(s) - which is to say: Direct community-funded software, no 501c-whatever nudging in between.