Finding Open Source Projects Looking For Help?

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?"

Comments

Does it have to be coding?

[AnonymousClown]

Some of you FOSS guys chime in here and correct me, but I bet any and every project would welcome you if you offered testing, writing testing scripts, and writing docs and help.

LaunchPad

[Anonymous Coward]

https://launchpad.net/

Re:Find project you like or use

[dotancohen]

Find project you like or use and start contributing. Or ask them if they need any help.

Most of the big ones do have "help us here" pages, such as KDE:
http://techbase.kde.org/Contribute

And another KDE page for those just starting out:
http://techbase.kde.org/Contribute/Junior_Jobs

So either the OP needs those links, or he is looking for smaller projects to help with. Here, let me suggest some small-project tools that I use that could use the help:
Anki, flash card application: http://ichi2.net/anki/index.html
Zim, desktop wiki: http://zim-wiki.org/
Gmail Conversation View for Thunderbird: http://github.com/protz/GMail-Conversation-View/issues
Vimperator/Muttator: http://vimperator.org/
Redshift, change screen colour per time of day: http://jonls.dk/redshift/

OpenHatch, an "open source involvement engine"

[paulproteus]

OpenHatch, a website I help run, exists to help people find ways they can contribute to free and open source software.

(It was covered on Slashdot a few weeks ago.)

We have a few things that you might like:

• The volunteer opportunity finder, a listing of free software projects' "bitesized" buts, organized by project, language, or type of help wanted (e.g. writing documentation). We index thousands of bugs from hundreds of projects.
• The "I want to help!" button, a way to express interest in helping a project even if you don't know what to do. For an example, check out the people who want to help GNU social.
• Project pages like Gally's, where existing contributors have written about what kind of help they want.

If you want to work on a project which has contributors in your area (maybe you want to get together for a hackathon, or to ask questions about how something in the code works), check out the ubiquitous People Map. You can see everyone on the site or browse by project or skill.

OpenHatch is itself free software, and we have a small and growing volunteer contributor base. (-:

Let us know what you do or don't like!

Here, have some links

[badpazzword]

FOSS advertisements currently running:
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/53346/open-source-advertising-sidebar-2h-2010

FOSS advertisements that have run until recently (but probably still can do with some help):
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/31913/open-source-advertising-sidebar-1h-2010-closed

Debian WNPP

[vlm]

Want to try your hand as sysadmin work?

Work-Needing and Prospective Packages

http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/

Not All of them

[rundgong]

All of them are not looking for help.
Not all open source software are open source because of the community collaboration aspect of it.
Some people just want to do their thing and work at it alone but for various reasons want to publish the source (ideological reasons, bragging rights, looks good on a resume, etc.)

I don't know how common this is, but it definitely exist.

Another reason a OSS project might not really be "hiring" is that it is half dead. It has a TODO list but it didn't make a release in a couple of years and there is no obvious activity that indicate another release is coming. If you are looking to make a meaningful contribution this is maybe not the project you are looking for.

Re:Free Software Job Listings

[Yvanhoe]

On the same website, FSF lists what it identifies as the ten most important free software to complete :
http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/
I, for one, believe CoreBoot to be the most important of them

Re:idea

[Mike.lifeguard]

This is precisely what openhatch.org is for.

Re:Find project you like or use

[buchner.johannes]

Virtually any Bugzilla install has "love" bugs, e.g. Gnome Love, or bugs that are tagged in a similar way for new devs to dive in.