Initial Thoughts
I feel like corp projects (specifically Deliver projects) got so so SO close but just missed the mark. I think they could be made into a powerhouse feature for corporations with a little change that would take very little developer resource.
Dynamic Deliver Projects
Unlike the current deliver projects which are static and only monitor items going IN to the Projects Hanger these projects would monitor the CURRENT quantity of the items in the hanger.
This would allow corporations to maintain an inventory of stock, be it ships, PI, capital parts, minerals etc. If the target is set to 100 Capital Cargo Bays and the Projects Hanger has 100 then no more will be accepted. If a director removes 50 from the hanger for a build project then the Deliver project drops back to 50%, corp members can then produce these items and restock the project back to 100%. Basically these would be never ending projects that are dynamic based on quantity that is in the hanger.
This functionality could be supplemented by some features that would take a bit more developer work than that above but would improve the system significantly
Payment for items
Either through a fixed price set in the project settings or more preferably a dynamic price that could be set based on % of Buy, % of Sell or Split price of any selectable market region in the game (not just current region) but with maximum prices that can be specified like Ansiplex fees.
This would automate the process of paying members for their contributions. It’s likely that a Projects Wallet would need to be created and that wallet would be required to have enough isk to fulfil all project orders to prevent old market escrow style scams.
ESI endpoint for reading contributions to projects
This is only really needed if the above automatic payments couldn’t be implemented. Corps could use the endpoint to get a list of contributions and times and pay people manually. Since we want more things easier and accessible to more corps the automatic option is far more preferable to this with all big players having the cool web apps and small up and comers struggling to compete
Ability to pause open ended projects
Basically just in case of big patches and expansions that may shake things up significantly. Corps will want to ability to suspend a project without deleting / completing it until things settle down a bit.
This is my 0.02c, I think it could be a FANTASTIC feature for corps to pool their resources for bigger projects, pay members for their efforts and give the up and coming corporations the ability to compete with the big boys and their spreadsheets and web applications without having to venture out of the game.
Keep up the innovation CCP, with a bit of tweaking it could be a huge success