If you are a student or free learner outside of formal education and you look for opportunities on contributing to an open source project – this is the place to start.

There are two places to find a project at which you could work on and that perhaps would even provide you with some mentors that would walk you into the project.

The two places to look for projects are:

1. Specific targeted project opportunities

2. General contribution opportunities

1. Specific targeted project opportunities

Some open source projects, in particular smaller ones, do have sometimes concrete needs. For such specific targeted project opportunities please have a look at the Learning Project Directory. Use the search option and under “advanced search option” select the criteria “I am looking for students to do this learning project”. This will show you all learning projects available to you!

2. General contribution opportunities

Larger projects, such as the Apache Software Foundation's ASF Mentoring Project have a more strategic approach towards contribution opportunities and mentoring. Opportunities to participate at those projects are generally provided through RSS feeds. For the ASF Mentoring Project you can find the RSS feed here and to learn more about the ASF Mentoring Project itself, please click here