You're not looking for a project "actively looking for new contributors". You're looking for a project you want to contribute to. You don't ask/interview for a spot on the team; you come up with a feature you will use, write it, and send diffs.

Even a project like Wordpress, which has a small army of PHP contributors, is "open to contributions". If you write something genuinely useful, send diffs, and are willing to transfer your rights to the code, chances are they'll seriously consider it. Of course, Wordpress probably "wants" you to build a plugin, not a core modification. But if your best idea is a core modification, just go write it.

You're overthinking this. Consider whether that's a sign that you're procrastinating.

As for open source programs I use on a daily basis and am interested in, they're mostly huge projects in C/C++ (Linux, Chrome, etc etc). Wordpress is the exception, but I haven't came across anything I need them to do that hasn't been covered in some plugin somewhere.

Which is why I asked here, in case there was some interesting project I would be interested in that I have the capability to actually do something useful for.

Another idea is to take a look at the projects on accepted into the Google Summer Of Code and see if any have projects that weren't accepted.

If you cannot name at least 5 things you dislike about the tools and languages you use you're either in the honeymoon period, or irrational. --Jesse Noller

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6nc1h/im_in_col...

The responses were pretty good. Ended up looking into Rubinius, eventually started http://rubygems.org :) Good luck in Python land!

"their codebase would require a good amount of time to get acquainted to" This will also be true for pretty much all projects.

Rather than focusing on the size of the project, try to find something you're interested in. If you're interested in the end product you'll probably be better motivated delving into the project.

I have no idea what size any of them are, and whether or not they are looking for contributors.

More important than either of those considerations is whether or not you - to quote another recent discussion here - "give a damn" about them. Are you interested in this project? Would you use the final product? Can you think of ways to improve the final product?

If the answer to any of those questions is no, then you probably shouldn't be working on that project. Look for a different one.

If you're really set on Python, then go down that list and check out each project. Check out the program, app, whatever and see if it excites you. Is it something you would use early and often? Do new feature ideas start spilling out of you brain as soon as you open it up? That's the project for you to work on.

1. have a taste for using simple, clean tools

2. when in need of software, see if you can find simple, clean tools that do what you need

3. prefer those that use languages you know or would like to learn

4. use them for a while and see if you like them and develop a sense of what kind of contributions you could make

5. check out the source to see if you can get a clear enough concept of it to develop some good patches

If all of that works out, submit your patches. Voila: you're an open source contributor.

Browse SourceForge or GitHub and you'll find literally tens of thousands of projects ranging from huge enterprise-scale development efforts that will likely never implement your code (OpenOffice, Linux kernel, Firefox) to small projects that are a cool idea but were never even developed to the point of an alpha release.

Personally, I like contributing to the latter of those categories. The small, cool-idea projects that never got their feet off the ground are the best places to start. There are several reasons I support this route, primarily that:

1.) Smaller projects need you more, and your code is more likely to actually be committed to a release version.

2.) You will actually be designing code. Monolithic projects like Firefox or OpenOffice certainly need developers, but mostly for bug fixes and slow feature additions. Developing for a small open source project will see you actually rolling out functionality--a skillset upon which you can build.

Good luck!

. . . or BitBucket or Google Code or even Launchpad.

I use BitBucket almost exclusively, because I prefer Mercurial over Git, for instance. So does a friend of mine, who has about ten different small (but worthy) projects -- probably perfect for someone looking to get started with his/her first contributions to an open source project, but (unfortunately for this case) all but one are in Ruby and that one is Perl; there's no Python or PHP in the list.

Anyway . . . start with whichever of these things supports the version control system you prefer. I think that's probably the best approach to finding projects to which you want to contribute, rather than picking one of the two most-mentioned code hosting sites in the open source community.

Hell, I've got a couple of small projects on BitBucket that could use some contributions, too -- but they're also Ruby, and probably less likely to be exciting for someone like the OP anyway.

Presumably, you use Python based tools whenever it makes sense. If not, fantisize about how great it would be if your favorite applications were written in Python. Search out useful looking apps in Python, some that show a lot of promise, but maybe the project is stalled or is not quite there yet. Install and use. Feel the pain of not having some feature.

Also, if you're feeling ambitious enough, look at applications written in other languages that you might rewrite in Python and make better.

e.g. n-interfaces, pointopoint options etc.

https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-virt/vmbuilder/trunk

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/%7Eubuntu-virt/vmbuilder/trunk/a...

In particular, the wsgi handler[s] are kind of in a state of flux, so improving one of those would be pretty dope.

If you ever felt like learning C well and then moving into m2core, you could even work with the one and only zed fucking shaw :P

We have a tiny dev team with 10 members, maybe 3 of 4 of us actually active, and would be more than happy for some help if you're interested.

http://fluxbb.org http://github.com/fluxbb/fluxbb irc://irc.freenode.net/fluxbb

Some of our existing code is rather badly outdated, so we are currently looking towards a major refactoring and redesign of a few core components, I posted some thoughts at https://fluxbb.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=4715 if you're curious.

We are having a brainstorming/work session at Shawn's (in San Francisco) on Thursday and we would love to have some more coders! Let me know if you are interested in attending and I will give you the details.

http://www.blogofile.com/

"Blogofile is a static website compiler, primarily (though not exclusively) designed to be a simple blogging engine. It requires no database and no special hosting environment. You customize a set of templates with Mako, create posts in a markup language of your choice (see Post Content) and Blogofile renders your entire website as static HTML and Atom/RSS feeds which you can then upload to any old web server you like."

I've actually written code to add static pages to Blogofile. I've been meaning to contribute it; I hope I'll get around to it soon.

There's an abandoned Drupal project called Memetracker that would leverage your Python skills AND make the world a better place if someone took it over.

Http:// drupal.org/project/memetracker

It's an open source reverse engineer of the Techmeme engine that gathers, filters, clusters, and ranks news. The original maintainers got it 50% finished before leaving for a startup. I've managed to get a private instance running that keeps me up to speed on what's in the news in Chicago. Even in it's primitive state, it tells me new things about the world I live in every day.

Imagine if anyone could start a techmeme for their neighborhood? They're industry? Their interest? The world would be a better place. We'd all be smarter for it.

We just need a good hacker to pick up the pieces.

http://drupal.org/contribute/development

That's better.

Also, if you turn up in the appropriate #drupal IRC channel and claim to be looking for some code to fix, you should have your inbox overflowing in no time.

Contributing to project(s) that you don't use is stupid and you'll be bored by it sooner than you realize... In the end you'll just waste a lot of time on something that won't be even committed.

In addition (in my experience) most of the code is very modular, clean and understandable.

[1] https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/

http://www.sagemath.org/