To find active popular open source projects?

How do you do it?

Word of mouth, organic exposure. I've only used github search only for a few time aside from quickly finding one of my repositories.

Typically github readme's are targeted at busy developers rather than beginner s as well.

They also include a contributor guide so I can see how hackable some project I'm using is.

I also prefer to use projects I wouldn't hate hacking on if forced to. So a PHP project has a much higher bar than aHaskell project.

Github and other forges easily allow this approach.

I don't actively try to find active open source project, usually I stumble onto plenty of them from natural browsing/research for my own work

That's why I was asking, why would you actively search for projects? To consider contributing or just out of curiosity?