Finding Open Source Projects Looking For Help? 151
aus writes "I've been doing web development for about 10 years now. It's been very good to me, but I want to do more than write HTML, PHP, JavaScript and CSS. Since the job market isn't all that great right now in the US, it would seem that volunteering some time on an open source project would give me the satisfaction I'm looking for. The problem is finding a project that wants/needs help that I would also be interested in. I've tried browsing around on Sourceforge and Freshmeat ... is there a site somewhere that I'm not aware of that has classifieds where open source project maintainers post 'job' listings?"
Sorta Kinda Maybe (Score:4, Interesting)
In the volunteer aspect it is more of a passion based decision than an recruitment oriented process. My advice is find something you both care about and also feel the site in question needs improvement. Next, simply hop on the forums or news feed and offer your services. It doesn't necessarily hurt to have some material already developed to get the discussion flowing.
Higher profile is probably going to be a bit more difficult so you may not want to go looking for the top 10 applications of all time. Those circles (even of volunteers) tend to be more work to edge your way into responsibility. Still, my experience has been very positive with contributions and generally working with a project I do not own. I had a good deal of fun one weekend with a BitPim developer banging out support for my phone.
If you need explicit areas where your talents could probably be used I highly recommend seeing if you can get the guys over at http://www.memtest.org/ [memtest.org] to let you revamp their page. The program is nice, but the web page is atrocious.
Does anyone else have any suggestions for who needs a make over? (That could be a reality series television show!)
Openhatch (Score:4, Interesting)
This might be useful
https://openhatch.org/
Nolambar
pleaseforkme.com (Score:4, Interesting)
Octave needs webdevs! (Score:4, Interesting)
You're a webdev? I know you said you don't want to keep doing that, but what else are you happy doing?
Right now, GNU Octave is looking to rebrand itself and is starting a website to rival Matlab Central [bitbucket.org]. The The Octave-Forge [sf.net] pages also need help, and a hot new designer star just recently came along who is helping us with logo and brand image design. His name is Fotios Kasolis.
You could do a lot of good if you got involved with us. Plus, Octave itself is interesting if you're into mathematics and numerical analysis.
TripleA (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:idea (Score:3, Interesting)
o Art. I can't draw stick figures. But I do need a few pieces of art such as an "Icon" in various forms and resolutions. Possibly a few "icons", such as a "represents the whole project", and an icon for different sub-projects (i.e., something like Mozilla -> Firebird, Thunderbird).
o Translation. It would be nice to do some internationalization. There's actually a few levels to this, as well. There's some relatively simple tasks, such as localizing approximately two dozen run time error messages, all the way up to a major undertaking like localization of the documentation.
There's obviously a few more high level categories that apply to most projects as well (porting, testing on platforms not readily available to the developers, etc). So, maybe some kind of "open source job site" where project owners can post "jobs" and include details like the type of license that is required for any contributions.
Re:Find project you like or use (Score:4, Interesting)
Seconded. You'll have at least a 50% hit rate as far as them needing help -- almost all projects want help, and about half are set up culturally and technically to take on new developers.
So pick the project first. If it doesn't need help, pick another. You'll find one soon enough.
Good active F/OSS project list (Score:2, Interesting)