Finding an Open Source Project to work on

Question

Hi, I am looking for some direction on finding a good open source project to work on. I am experienced in Java and PHP and am currently learning C, however, I don't know if I am comfortable enough in it yet to contribute anything.

I tried looking at mediawiki but there wasn't really anything to do as it is such a big project with so many developers working on. I'd like to find something reasonably small without a ton of people working on it so I can actually have some input and work on some real features.

If anyone knows of a project please list it however even better would be a link to a site with resources on finding projects.

Thanks

Answer 1

Have you checked SourceForge yet? There are thousands of open source projects there of varying size in many different languages including C and Java.

Answer 2

Choose a project you believe in - I don't think others can find that for you. Progress (and success) are most likely when you match your work with your passion.

Answer 3

As well as sourceforge, try freshmeat since it includes projects hosted all over the place.

Answer 4

Another option is to check your desktop.

You'll definitely feel more rewarded contributing to something you are actually using everyday, right now, than looking into some project you don't really use much.

Besides that way you get to eat your own dogfood, as Google (or was that 3M?) says ;)

Answer 5

You should search Github. In your case you should specifically check out the Java, PHP, and C projects. These pages list all types of information about the various projects for a specific language including popular projects, large projects, and recently active projects among others. There is a myriad of projects to contribute to and GitHub makes it really easy to get your feet wet contributing to OSS projects.

Answer 6

Seeing as you know PHP, a small project that I am also attempting to start contributing to is called XAJAX. I dont know too much about it except that it is an exceptionally useful AJAX library for PHP