“How do I get involved in free and open source software?”

“How do I encourage people to join my project?”

Gregory Wilson, a CS professor at UToronto, cites some recent successes at answering these questions with respect to students: “Google Summer of Code and UCOSP have both shown that it’s easier for students to get into open source projects if there’s a pile of tiny tickets for them to start with.” We believe that these “bite-size” bug lists can benefit all sorts of new contributors, student or not. What you might not know is that more than a hundred projects have these small tasks tagged and waiting for you in their bug trackers.

To make it easier to find these, the OpenHatch volunteer opportunity finder allows you to browse, in one place, nearly 1000 bite-size bugs.

Do you know another project with bite-size opportunities we should index? You can get your project involved. Check out the list of bug trackers we index. If you contribute to a project, go to your bug tracker right now and label a few as bite-size. Then add your bug tracker to our index.

I want to especially thank GNOME for the ongoing GNOME Love effort that is our inspiration and the source of hundreds of these bite-size opportunities.

Happy hacking!