How do you start contributing to open source?

I often get this question, from friends, from colleagues, from customers… What is the best way to start contributing to open source? In particular sometimes it comes from people who use open source but are not necessarily programmers. It may seem strange to them that you can contribute to an open source program while not being a programmer. But it’s very easy!

First let’s look a little bit at what it means to contribute to an open source project. A project is a very complex structure, and there are people to keep it running in multiple places. Obviously the first ones that people think of are the programmers. But there are also people who are there just to keep the community active, like organizing events, there are people who focus on branding and graphical aspects like logos, user interface, icons, buttons… so really, you want to think about your skills. Let me give a few examples here.

If you are fluent in one or more languages offered for the application, you could join the internationalisation team. It’s often quite simple. It can start with reporting a translation bug, or directly going to the project site (more on that later) and pulling the files and doing edits yourself.

If you have good writing skills, as mentioned above, you can tackle some of the documentation (or the translation of existing documentation if there’s already one language available).

Some people are just good with a graphic palette, or a camera. Almost every project out there needs people with graphics skills, either to help with illustrations for the documentation, or with the user interface visuals (icons, buttons, come to mind)… and if you have some UX/UI experience, then it’s even better, you can contribute to that.

A lot of open source projects involve people from multiple locations, often even from multiple countries. Animating that community, and making sure that intercultural issues don’t hinder communications requires some pretty fine skills. If you have those, help with the community management. You may get involved in social networks, in press relations, in moderating or answering questions in forums, and of course, there’s always a need for people who can help with events. Your favorite project is going to be present at open source or industry events… somebody will have to make sure all goes well there. It could be you!

And of course, if you can code… you can contribute by correcting bugs, or directly writing additional code (new features, optimisations, cleaning up…).

My first contribution to open source was patching the makefile and a few #defines and #include in PGP to get it to run on the machine I had at my disposal in the office so that I could place a secure order (back in 1993, nobody had web browsers to make purchases). I send the edits to the project team and they were included. At that time it was as simple as that. And I didn’t really write that much code for this to happen.

Nowadays it’s a bit more complicated, but not much more.

Many open source projects are hosted on GitHub or some other platform for sharing source code. Each platform has it’s rules. But basically you can pull some code from a repository, compile it, test it, patch it, then you would submit back the changes with explanations so that they can be incorporated.

So you see, there are plenty of opportunities to contribute to open source projects. Not all of them involve writing actual code. You can participate with whatever level of expertise you have and still make a difference!

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