I'd love to have an easier way to get involved in some open source project for improving my skills, enhancing my CV, etc.
My main challenge is being overwhelmed with information and I can't seem to find a good place to get started on any project.
My main challenge is being overwhelmed with information and I can't seem to find a good place to get started on any project.
Not to sound trite, but I don't think the reasons you enumerated for contributing to a project would give most people enough incentive to spend the energy figuring out how to contribute to most projects. Find the project that makes you go "yeah!" and you'll find it much easier to get acclimated to whatever it is, because you'll really want to understand how it works.
- GitHub, Google Code, Bitbucket, SourceForge, CodePlex, ...
- Google Summer of Code, Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Projects, OpenHatch, ...
Getting involved in open source is easy, there's way too many projects that die or go unmaintained because there's no one to help. I have a few projects that could use contributors, but I assume you want to get involved in an active, serious, and popular open source project. Whatever project you're interested in, subscribe to their mailing list (won't hurt to introduce yourself), join their IRC channel, look at their open issues, grep the source for TODOs, look for something to improve, and submit your patch.