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Re:Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going... by smcl on Thursday February 05, 2015 @11:37AM (#9004126)
I had no idea this project (and others) had so few contributors. I'd love to be involved in some Open Source project but I always feel like "yeh there's probably millions of people far more talented than me wanting to contribute" and I've no idea how to start. Some people suggest taking a look at the open bug lists for software you use frequently, but on the few occasions I've tried that (python, gcc, and a couple of others) I've ended up digging through lists of tough bugs each with fairly impressive sounding discussions by people who are way more familiar with the whole ecosystem than I am and it's sort of intimidating.

I did manage to do some isolated contributions to Open Corporates (http://turbot.opencorporates.com) where the community are super-welcoming and very patient, but I've felt a little isolated and like I'm not exactly giving much back. Apologies for the mildly-OT rambling.

Re:Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going... by therealdrag0 on Thursday February 05, 2015 @01:08PM (#9004757)
I'd suggest looking for smaller repos to contribute to. Much less daunting, much more opportunity. My small OS contributions have been where a small repo, owned by one guy, does mostly what I'm looking for but I want some feature or notice some bug. Then it is easy to work on it/fix and do a pull request. They're usually happy for the activity.
Re:Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going... by pyre on Thursday February 05, 2015 @11:43AM (#9004168)
> I've ended up digging through lists of tough bugs each with fairly impressive sounding discussions by people who are way more familiar with the whole ecosystem than I am and it's sort of intimidating.

Sometimes it's small things, like documentation. For example:

http://bugs.python.org/issue17701

Re:Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going... by shackenberg on Thursday February 05, 2015 @12:31PM (#9004526)
Good point, but you have to admit that the site does not look inviting at all and that a novice has no idea where to start.
Re:Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going... by bloodorange on Thursday February 05, 2015 @03:49PM (#9005969)
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/

Mozilla is quite friendly and makes it easy to contribute. I've had quite a pleasant experience whenever I tried to make a contribution.

Re:Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going... by zanny on Thursday February 05, 2015 @04:53PM (#9006396)
KDE actually marks easy jobs as junior jobs for new contributors:

https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_...

And their bug tracker is fairly pretty too.

Re:Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going... by irremediable on Thursday February 05, 2015 @01:34PM (#9004938)
I've sometimes wondered whether it'd be worth mid-to-large open source projects doing more triage for bugs. Because I'm in a similar position: I'm happy to make small fixes to stuff I use, but I'm not familiar enough with many codebases to fix big bugs. If I could pull up a list of bugs sorted by "expected ease of fix", I think I'd contribute a lot more.
Re:Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going... by brohee on Thursday February 05, 2015 @01:47PM (#9005033)
Many people do, e.g. bugs tagged E-easy in rust bug DB

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/labels/E-easy

Re:Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going... by irremediable on Thursday February 05, 2015 @03:01PM (#9005589)
I stand corrected! Never seen that before. Pretty awesome.
Re:Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going... by dandelion_lover on Thursday February 05, 2015 @07:13PM (#9007060)
I would suggest you to look also at high-priority free software projects: https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects.