How I select Open Source projects

What about rules for an educational material? Let's say I create an open source project for others to learn from. It cannot be too complicated but it should do something useful. Here is what I think:

    Is the project actively developed? 

Yes but no new features. Just docs improvements.

    Are there more people developing?

That would be nice but not necessary. Educational material shouldn't need a large codebase.

    Are there releases?

There should be no new major release for an educational material. We want new people to be able to get up to speed quickly.

    Are there docs?

Educational material should have very thorough documentation. I'd say there should be 0.5 ratio of comments and code.

    Methods

Code should be simple - even if it has to do complicated operations. There should be no advanced idioms (at least no language specific idioms).

My rules are: Does it work? Can I fix it when it breaks?