tl;dr

there are dozens of ways to contribute to any project

it's about community, not code

keep away from poisonious people

As OS//OS is happening in Wellington at the moment, I wanted people to be able to flick through a guide on getting started to each other. Sadly, I am not able to be at the event, but I hope that this is useful to people who are newly inspired to get amongst it.

My story

I have been involved in open source for many years. It started with me writing contributions for a wiki for a software project that is used by disaster response agencies to coordinate themselves in the wake of an emergency. That and a desire to build a better world, piece by little piece.

My time with open source has involved with me running conferences for hundreds of people, travelling around the world, writing pretty ordinary software and being part of very important committees. But mostly, it has involved interacting with extremely passionate people to make the world a better place.

Each project is its own snowflake

Every project is going to have its own way of dealing with things. As you explore, there will be a different funding model, social hierarchy, code quality standards and personalities everywhere.

Some general tips:

join the mailing list, lurk for a while and have a look at who the influencers are. If there's no mailing list, look at how people are talking to each other via pull requests.

observe how the established members of a community talk to newbies. You don't waste your time with a bunch of jerks.

you're going to be hit with lots of jargon. Roll with it, it will soon all start to sound quite natural once you have progressed through a few cycles of confusion/anger/acceptance.

Non-technical contributions

This is where open source groups really need help. Geeks love code, and they're typically dismissive about things like documentation, user experience and design.

Nevertheless, that's the kind of stuff that really move a project up in the eyes of its potential adopters. If you point out irks that you've experienced as a user, and hopefully start talking about constructive ways to iron them out, you'll be doing the project a great service.

There are hundreds of ways to contribute to a "software" project.

Side note: I've written a lengthy Quora answer about this to a question called "Why does open source software have such ugly interfaces?" if you would like to read more.

Technical contributions

If you are not a "coder", don't feel excluded making technical contributions. You'll want to start by producing excellent bug reports. A project needs people who are willing to use the system and track down hard to find bugs.

Many older projects will have their own systems, but many recent ones use a website called Github. You should probably stick there while you're getting your feet wet.

A note of caution for women

Thousands of open source communities are struggling with the reality that women exist and are people too.

There have been a number of high profile cases of abuse and harassment against women. I'm sure that there are many more cases of this sort of behaviour with a signifcantly lower profile.

I am not an expert in providing advice in protecting yourself out there, but someone I trust a great deal recommends using a gender neutral name in online forums.

Please don't let this scare you! There are many wonderful people in open source, but there are also a large number of offensive bigots out there too.

So, where do I start?

Oh, that's easy! OpenHatch is your friend.

p.s.