Make your first contribution to open source

Open source software is more than just a development model, it’s also a community. And open source projects thrive when they welcome new contributors into those communities.

If you’re looking to get started in open source, you might wonder how to make your first step. We wanted to find ways to connect new contributors with open source projects that need help. We asked specifically about non-coding opportunities, such as writing the docs, translating the docs, or converting the docs. Here’s what we found:

Kevin suggested helping a Linux distribution with their documentation:

Alpine Linux is struggling with documentation and could use help.

—Alpine Linux is a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution.

Another reader shared a similar recommendation:

Does the Gentoo Linux Wiki count? Or perhaps more specifically the Gentoo Handbook.

—Gentoo Linux is a highly flexible, source-based Linux distribution.

Penguin42 suggests joining LibreOffice’s documentation effort:

LibreOffice’s documentation team starting point is the Document Foundation Wiki.

—LibreOffice is a private, free and open source office suite, compatible with Microsoft Office/365 files and is backed by a non-profit organisation.

Paul recommends working with the MDN Web Docs site:

You may want to have a look at what the MDN team are doing over at Contribute to MDN.

—MDN Web Docs is a comprehensive online resource for web developers that provides documentation on web standards like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Amin Girasol pointed to the Fujinet project:

The students who are interested in the sociotechnical aspects of technical writing in a team setting may be interested in attempting to interact with the Fujinet community. Everyone in the community understands the documentation is a shambles, but a handful of opinionated gatekeepers block actual progress.

Most of the discussion about Fujinet happens on their Discord.

—FujiNet is a multi-peripheral emulator and WiFi network device for vintage computers.

Dustin Mitchell suggested a man page conversion:

Taskwarrior has some decent docs already but they suffer from being written long ago and being heavily patched. It also has man pages in troff that could use a conversion to a more writable format.

—Taskwarrior is free and open source software that manages your TODO list from the command line.

Medley Interlisp Project is looking for help:

We would appreciate help with tasks such as converting OCRed scanned documentation PDFs to usable formats, possibly native to Interlisp. We can also discuss ideas in other areas.

The Medley Interlisp Project revives and modernizes the Interlisp development and system environment created at Xerox PARC between the 1970s and 1980s. Some of the original developers and users founded and contribute to the project.

Jeroen Baten suggested several projects at once:

Try the Ardour project— “record, edit, and mix on Linux, macOS and Windows.” And the LibrePlan project— “LibrePlan is an open source web-based project management application.” And probably thousands more!

JabRef asked for documentation help:

We would appreciate some help with our user documentation as well. For the most part, it’s describing new features and or updating/clarifying existing functionality. See JabRef documentation at GitHub.

—JabRef is an open-source, cross-platform citation and reference management tool.

Jeremy Monat says RDKit needs documentation help:

For example, splitting RDKit Documentation into a page per topic so search results would lead more immediately to the desired code?

—However, Greg Landrum replied and questioned if this is the right approach. This could be an interesting starting point for a discussion.

Adapted from Open source technical writing opportunities by Technically We Write, with permission.