[vanessa]

CodeMontage's fee covers the cost of helping you find projects that are right for your level (perhaps you can navigate this on your own, but many people new to development and new to open source struggle with this), facilitating feedback and making sure you get code reviews, and helping you measure your improvement as a coder, not just asking you to volunteer without measuring your impact.

This is the first formal session of CodeMontage, and in the future we plan to make the whole platform and participation much more flexible than formal sessions. Hope that helps!

[columbo]

Hrm, are you a non-profit or have you considered that?

It seems odd to pay an unknown entity (you) and then perform a service (write code) all for a very high level idea alone (the good).

I feel for this to work there must be some sort of 'meet in the middle', like a non-profit, where you can actually track what the $500 expense is going to be used for.