Offer a referral service to find short-term developers around the world (Feature #2209)

Excellent suggestion;I am a recent graduate myself and I have basic OpenCV experience.It is indeed useful for people like me to build on the experience I have from college and I was looking for such opportunities like what Mr.Shervin mentioned; It would have mutual benefits.
Shervin Emami wrote:

This is just an idea I had that might help OpenCV / Itseez generate some revenue. I was thinking of creating a company to do it myself one day but it would be more respected if the official OpenCV team do it:

I worked for a few years as a freelance computer vision developer on the web, and after I created a nice online presence (mostly through the Yahoo usergroup and my personal website), I started getting around 1 job offer per week for a short-term OpenCV related project, and since I was usually too busy for new projects I would recommend other OpenCV developers that were looking for freelance projects at the time, and if it was a developer that I had talked with previously to make sure they had reasonable OpenCV knowledge, then I would charge the company a fee for helping them find a "trustworthy" developer. There are LOTS of recent uni graduates or experienced developers around the world that would love to work remotely on part-time/full-time on short-term/long-term projects, and there are also just as many startup companies (mostly American or European companies) looking for people with experience in OpenCV to create prototypes for them.

So if Itseez or the OpenCV team created a basic infrastructure to allow developers to say they are looking for freelance computer vision jobs, and a way for companies to look for potential freelance developers, then I think both sides would be happy and both sides would be OK with paying a basic fee to Itseez / OpenCV for this service. eg: it could be just a page on the main website letting developers submit a form describing OpenCV projects they have worked on and how much time they have available, and a page for companies to describe what type of project they want and the difficulty level and when it is needed by, etc.

It seems the typical freelance rates are around $5/hr for uni students or recent graduates with basic OpenCV experience, $15/hr for people with decent commercial experience with OpenCV, and $25/hr for those with lots of experience with OpenCV. The standard "referral" rate seems to be around 10% fee that you could charge the company. One way to figure out how experienced the developers are is to ask the developer to work for free (or maybe $2/hr) for their first short-term project and based on a feedback rating from the company, decide which rate they should be given for their next job, etc. Or you could create a test to see how much the developer knows, but the developer could cheat by asking an expert to do the test for them, whereas they are unlikely to cheat on a real project, and it wouldn't really matter if they did anyway if the project was done!