OpenHatch was a nonprofit project helping newcomers find open source projects and mentors, and ran outreach workshops for women.
HN commenters point newcomers to OpenHatch as a place to find open source work, alongside Summer of Code and Outreachy.
This is great. I want this information to be in a form easily accessible and readable for any project maintainer who wants to learn about concrete ways to improve their projects. So, question: what form should that be? A blog post explaining the highlights, with a title with good keywords? A YouTube video with explanations and anecdotes, like a talk without a conference? Where do maintainers learn about this kind of thing (other than occasional news posts on HN with advice), so that we can make this information show up there?
I volunteer for OpenHatch (https://openhatch.org/), a non-profit open source project that aims to help newcomers contribute to projects + help projects make themselves more welcoming. What do you think is the most effective step OpenHatch could take for helping maintainers? It has some efforts already, and I have some ideas, but I'm curious to hear more ideas. (Also if you want to help, OpenHatch is already a loose collection of people who care about this; come join us.)
There are several ways to get started and it depends a lot on your motivations and are of interest. However the main piece of advice is to jump in, dont be worried about upsetting someone system, some OS projects arent setup well for contribution and they will become easy to spot, but for the ones that are, doing something 'wrong' is a great way for a maintainer to come along and help introduce you to how to do it 'right'.
http://openhatch.org works a lot on making initial contributions easier, if you are interested in express then you dont need to work on the core framework, write a plugin and open source it, contributing is by far easier when you have a real need to do so, maybe someone will use your plugin and find a problem they want to fix, maybe you will use someones project and want to fix something.
I and some friends began a startup to make getting involved easier. We're building an open source involvement engine, helping people showcase their contributions to open source and find new opportunities. One thing I'm particularly happy with is our volunteer opportunity search engine; we index bugs from projects large and small, and we showcase places where projects have said they want help from new contributors. There's no other cross-project opportunity search.
Sign up for our alpha at http://openhatch.org/. Right now, before you forget! We'd love more feedback from people interested in getting involved.
Today is Demo Day run by our funders, Shotput Ventures, in case you follow those things.
Once we hit public beta (just a little while) we'll make a real announcement here. (-:
I can point you to two places:
1. http://pythonmentors.com/
This will solve the mentor-ship problem you have. Folks in the core and around who are mentors will listen to your problems and can help you on the way. Although they are very nice with newbies, please make sure that you try to be as clear and professional in your approach/questions as possible.
2. http://openhatch.org/
This website gives you small, medium and tough level of bugs in most of the prominent opensource projects.
Hope this helps.
There are a couple sites[0,3] which list projects which are looking for contributions. In addition, Github Explore[1] has different projects which might be of interest. If you're interested in larger projects, different companies have guides to getting involved and contributing[2].
[0]: http://www.lookingforpullrequests.com/
[1]: https://github.com/explore
[2]: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/
[3]: http://openhatch.org/
I believe sites like http://up-for-grabs.net/ and https://openhatch.org/ are the kind of communities that we need more of.
There is an attitude where people create projects to feed their egos, and giving help on existing projects doesn't seem to fulfil egos so much. Unfortunately, marketing your project is necessary, and for now the only idea I can give you is that we need to build tools to make that job easier.