I don't see why vetting would put any more liability on Kickstarter - all the 'responsibility lies with the creator' legal mumbo-jumbo can remain in place.
If you browse this thread you'll find lots of suggestions from different people. Probably other people will have better ideas than mine, but for what it's worth: I'd require projects successfully raising a large amount (say, more than the price of a midsized car) for hardware to agree a series of milestones, releasing the funds to them in stages. The precise milestones would be agreed on a project-by-project basis, but could include: Some money up front, some money when they have a preliminary electrical schematic and prototype on breadboard, some money when they have a costed bill of materials and a final prototype, some money when they have a feature-complete mobile app, and some money as the products start shipping and the invoices from manufacturers start arriving.
To put it another way, creators can't have any pudding if they don't eat their meat.
"to agree a series of milestones, releasing the funds to them in stages. The precise milestones would be agreed on a project-by-project basis, but could include"
My first reaction is that that's a good idea. But on second thought this would create quite a burden and bureaucracy at kickstarter to monitor and make sure the right thing happened. I would imagine that for that reason alone they wouldn't go for that but I could be wrong.
Well, in the case of the 'LIFX' bulb mentioned in the article, they've made a 5% commission on the $870,447 raised and I can't imagine too much of that would go on administration.
I agree admin costs would be a problem for smaller projects; if Kickstarter was only making $2500 total on a project they couldn't afford a thorough technical design audit. Some costs could be kept down with technology, e.g. prototype demo youtube videos, which creators should be doing to keep their backers engaged anyway. You'd risk rigged demos, of course.
Crowd funding is still a developing industry at the moment, and it's mostly assumption on my part that makes me think creators failing to deliver is going to be a problem. It's going to be interesting seeing what develops.
If you browse this thread you'll find lots of suggestions from different people. Probably other people will have better ideas than mine, but for what it's worth: I'd require projects successfully raising a large amount (say, more than the price of a midsized car) for hardware to agree a series of milestones, releasing the funds to them in stages. The precise milestones would be agreed on a project-by-project basis, but could include: Some money up front, some money when they have a preliminary electrical schematic and prototype on breadboard, some money when they have a costed bill of materials and a final prototype, some money when they have a feature-complete mobile app, and some money as the products start shipping and the invoices from manufacturers start arriving.
To put it another way, creators can't have any pudding if they don't eat their meat.