I would rather vote for NEM funds to be spent on new internal researches then looking for dev teams around the world to apply and develop new NEM technologies. Similar to what ETC is doing now. Any external requests for funds is a red red red flag!

Consider all the failing insecure Ethereum dapps that just sucked money from crowd funding. NEM dev funds should never get trapped in any sort of crowd funding for projects or Dapps that operates on NEM unless the project/research is a core NEM piece that initially been developed internally by the NEM dev team. Only then we can vote.

A third party request for funds should not even open the door for any sort of voting! I would rather vote and debate such principal first.