Finding Open Source Projects

Several direction how to select a project to contribute to.

Propriatery projects

While the focus of the course is working on Open Source projects in some cases the organization where the participants work or study won’t agree to publish their code using an open source license. In such cases the participants can work on the source code they write in private GitHub accounts so the code won’t become public. We will still practice the techniques and methodologies.

The participants will be also required to do some of their assignments on open source projects.

Non-coding projects.

There are plenty of projects that need contribution where programming is not involved. Some of these projects are listed in the here, but there are many more.

Projects by your school or by your workplace

Open Source packages your lab uses (e.g. specific biology oriented packages or more generic ones such as numpy or flask)

If you study at a university, college, or maybe work at a research institute, labs in your organization probably have already published projects under some open source license. You can search GitHub, you can ask around and we also already have a (partial) list of higher education institutions that published open source code. You might already find the projects there.

Open Source packages your lab / institution develops. They might not be in git and not in GitHub yet. You can take one of these projects and start using git, GitHub for it.

The students will be encouraged to look at the open source projects published by your institution.

OS packages your institution uses e.g.

Projects by governments

There are quite a few government organization around the world that published open source code. Some of those are already in our list. It might be important for you to look at the code your government is using and make sure it is of high quality.

Non-profit organizations

Non-profits are usually happy to receive financial donation, but contributing to their software can be also a huge help and can be very satisfying.

Projects by corporations

We also have a list of corporations that published open source code. Contributing to these projects might help you pave your way to work at the specific organizations.

Projects you use

If in your research you already use third-party libraries, it is a good idea to look at those and see if you can contribute there. That would probably primarily mean biology, chemistry, etc. related projects, but they can also be more generic projects such as graph and image generation or matrix manipulation projects.

We will also work on the various biology, chemistry, physics, etc. oriented open source projects they use in their projects.

Projects people marked as easy

People add tags to their projects on GitHub. There are many tags in use, some of those that might indicate issues that are suited for people who are beginners either in the GitHub contribution process or in the specific technology, or even in general in software development.

In addition to filtering by tag you could also filter by programming language to further narrow down the possibilities.

See also this article

Project by Code-Maven

For example the Diggers (Meta data, Continuous Integration, tests)

We currently have 3 projects that collect information about 3rd-party packages and try to help you find you low-hanging-fruits. You can use them to find projects to contribute to or you can contribute to the diggers themselves:

List of projects

More languages will be added here.