Solving the problem of open source contributions - contrihub.com

Projects are born and die every day. Most often than not they die from lack of motivation to further their goals or simply lack of time. That's a pity because most of these projects are useful and solve meaningful problems. What if we could pass a dying project back to the community? What if there was an easy way to find new people to help you with a new project or carry on an old one?

Our goal is to provide a dedicated service for contributors and owners of open source projects that tremendously seek for contributions. Project owners will be able to request for help, while developers will have a lean and clean way to get involved and interact with the community. Contrihub is a website created as part of the RailsRumble 2012 hackathon so, as a prototype, it is rough around the edges and bumpy in between. We apply heuristics to open source projects in order to determine, whether or not a project needs contributions by determining a score based on factors like open and closed pull requests, issues, collaborators, watchers, forks, downloads. A project owner can verify the project ownership with a simple request and plead for help. Verified projects where the owners actively ask for help are boosted even further. Organisations, companies, FOSS foundations or individuals can use this service to invigorate projects.

By the time the competition ends, we are willing to further extend in functionality. Eventually we plan to as many contributors with a project where the contributions will have a revitalizing commitment. The matching will be based both on expression of interest as well as help spot interesting projects that are in dire need of help, thus achieving maximum impact.

What are your criteria for contributing? What do you think would be the best way to identify projects that need help? Feel free to share your thoughts. We need your feedback on the idea.

TL;DR

We have created a website that aggregates open source projects that need help by contributors.