Payments, Forms and Other Administrivia

How do payments work?

SIDE-Labs will provide a stipend of 2500 USD per accepted student, of which 2000 USD goes to the student and 500 USD goes to the mentoring organization.

• Students who receive passing mid-term evaluations will receive a 1000 USD stipend shortly after the mid-term evaluation deadline, July 31, 2010.
• Students who receive passing final evaluations and who have submitted their final program evaluations will receive a 1000 USD stipend shortly after the final evaluation deadline, August 31, 2010.
• Mentoring organizations will receive 500 USD per student shortly after the final evaluation deadline, August 31, 2010.

Please note that SIDE-Labs cannot issue any payments until the proper tax-related documentation is submitted. The forms required will be provided to you and you do not need to submit them until you are asked to do so by SIDE-Labs. More detailed documentation on payments forthcoming.

I would like to use the work I did for my SUMO project to obtain course credit from my university. Is this acceptable?

Absolutely. If you need documentation from SIDE-Labs to provide to your school so you can obtain course credit, we can provide it to you. Nevertheless, we will not provide documentation to you until we have received a positive final evaluation from your mentor.

Isn't it unusual for open source developers to be paid?

Not really. Many of our mentors get paid to work on open source. Some run their own consultancies, others tinker for some cash on the side, others work for large companies. Some profess to code for cotton. Don't be naive, nobody can live on love and fresh air ;-)

That said, we do understand it is tricky to introduce cash into the mix of Free and Open Source, but SIDE-Labs itself has been funded by the BlueXML company. We hope that working with external organizations with years of collective experience in this kind of thing will help to build a sustainable project with benefits for all.

What documentation is required from students?

We will need the following documentation from students:

• For all students, we will need their student card transcript/proof of enrollment in school. Transcripts do not need to be official.

Detailed instructions for obtaining and returning these documents to SIDE-Labs will be sent to the private students' mailing list. We will need to have all of this documentation on file before issuing payment to a particular student.

What tax related documentation is required from mentoring organizations?

SIDE-Labs will ask you the documentation corresponding to your organization's type. All organizations are paid via purchase order from SIDE-Labs, which will require registering as a vendor in our payments system. Detailed instructions for registering as a vendor and invoicing SIDE-Labs for payment will be sent to the private mentors' mailing list. We will need to have all needed documentation on file before issuing payment to a particular mentoring organization.