paulproteus

perlgeek, thanks for signing up!

That's something we just got an email about earlier in the month, though no one has filed a bug to formally request it yet. I just took a moment to do that: https://openhatch.org/bugs/issue925

If you want to add yourself as "Nosy" then you'll hear about updates to that, as the community gets moving on in it.

Hi there! So glad you're excited about that.

We're really excited about that, too, and if you join the IRC channel, we'll do our best to connect you with a project.

Additionally, I wrote this:

http://opensource-usability.blogspot.com/2013/12/guest-post-...

that I would love your thoughts on.

Yes, we just had some site problems; they seem fixed now, and additionally, I pushed a front page redesign some contributors had been working on for the past month! : D

(I'm one of the original people who started OpenHatch and on the board of the non-profit.) Thanks to sedeki for letting other people know!

First of all, kudos to you for thinking about contributing to bigger projects, and open source ones at that!

Projects with large codebases always take some time to figure out. Therefore, it's wise to start with a bug that a more experienced programmer has labeled "bitesize". Other commenters here mentioned Josh Matthews' super-cool "Bugs Ahoy" tool for Mozilla -- http://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsahoy/. I'll chime in that I'm a maintainer of a similar thing that covers even more projects: https://openhatch.org/search/

If you want a general roadmap of how this works, we (OpenHatch) have also written up a step-by-step guide here: http://labs.openhatch.org/foss-contrib-guide/ . Work through it as a checklist, clicking the box next to each step as you do them. We've found that works really well with people.

The two big things in my opinion, as you start out, are:

* Find a project that you care about. Otherwise, you'll lose momentum. It's cool that you want to work on Mozilla-y projects! My only warning is that the long build time means you are going to have to plan to wait a while (about 1 hour) between downloading the code and actually running your local build.

* Find a task that is doable, so you can actually get it fixed, and you actually enjoy it!

Some things to watch out for:

* The build process could be super slow, for big projects like Firefox.

* Eventually you're going to have to get used to navigating enormous projects. This might sound daunting, but actually I think you'll find it fun after a bit.

* Make sure you have a place where you can reach out and get help. You'll probably be running into all sorts of new things -- version control tools, patch submission guidelines, an enormous codebase -- and you're more likely going to have a good time if you can get your questions answered.

For that last one, feel mega free to join #openhatch via IRC on freenode.net (more info on that here if you don't know IRC -- https://openhatch.org/wiki/Open_Source_Comes_to_Campus/JHU/L... ). OpenHatch is a community of people welcoming to newcomers in open source generally, and we can usually help you straighten out whatever problems you're running into.

There's also #newbies on irc.mozilla.org; I'd recommend joining there, too.

If you want a quick tour of what it's like to submit a patch, you can work through the OpenHatch training missions at https://openhatch.org/missions/.

You asked for a "flexible time framework" -- the good news, it's all on your own timeline. You can show up whenever you want. If you can explain more about what you wanted with that question, I'd be happy to explain.

Good luck! Welcome aboard!

Jesse, you and I chatted briefly at PyCon. I'm Asheesh, that person who gave that PyCon talk about outreach.

You (and this Python Mentors program) totally rock. It's hard to even name all the things the program gets right.

It is automatic -- it crawls projects' bug trackers. That way, projects can mark bugs as "good for newcomers" without us forcing them to use new tools.

Having said that, the site does give projects a space to write about ways people can get involved beyond what's in the bug trackers. You can see at https://openhatch.org/+projects/Gally that a project maintainer requested something rather unique: a call for videos of people signing individual words in American Sign Language.

(I'm the submitter.)

It turns out there are hundreds of open source projects where the maintainers mark bugs as good for new contributors. So here you can browse them. The projects range from well-known like the Python language and Firefox down to small MediaWiki extensions.

If you're up to your neck in code and would rather write some documentation, you can try that, too.

Penny for your thoughts.

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. (-: