Walk on Familiar Ground

Intent: Select a FLOSS project to contribute with based on your familiarity as an end-user.

Motivation

You have been using open source software for a while – for instance, your preferred text editor, a web browser, etc. – most of them developed by a community of volunteers, and you feel a will or sense of obligation to give back. One possible way to give back is to apply your own effort and current skills to some existing FLOSS project. These skills may be related to software development practice – programming, bug fixing, testing, working in teams – or not – for example, performing translations. Or it may be the case that you had an innovative idea, for instance, some code editing feature not provided by any IDE, even the open source IDE that you frequently use.

Problem

How can you select a FLOSS project to contribute with that allows you to give back to the community?

Forces

Fear of the dark. You may not feel comfortable when contributing to a project that you know little about.
Feed two birds with one scone. You plan to give back to the community by investing your time and effort while contributing to some open source project, but you may, as well, get additional benefits.
Spinach can. You want to strengthen your developing skills by contributing to a free software project.

Solution

Select a free software that you already use for contributing with, for example, your text editor, your web browser, your presentation software, your e-mail program, or your instant messaging program. If you also develop software, you may choose to contribute to one of the libraries or infrastructure software (compilers, IDE, etc.) you use. In any situation, make sure that the project you use is open source and accepts contributions from external developers.

Use your knowledge as a software user to Write Documentation or to Translate To Your Language important parts of the documentation. As a software user, you may stay tuned and Write Useful Bug Reports whenever you deal with errors.

However, to contribute by developing code or fixing bugs, you need to familiarize yourself also with the source code and with development issues. For instance:

If you installed the software using a package manager, it’s likely that you haven’t even visited the project’s website. Take your time to visit the the project’s website, navigate throughout online material and Skim the Documentation available to developers.
If you installed the software using an installer, you probably don’t have the source code. Grab the source code and Do a Mock Installation. You may also need to get the development files for the libraries that the project uses.

Trade-Offs

Pros:

It might be easier to spot opportunities for contributing to a project that you already use. The contribution can be a piece of documentation that is missing, a translation, a feature that you need, or a fix for an annoying bug.
Since many of your contributions will be useful to yourself (and to people with similar needs), you may feel more motivated to contribute.
The more opportunities for contributing, the higher chance that you become successful and gain reputation.

Cons:

By restricting yourself to projects that you already use, you may be missing the opportunity to contribute to projects that are friendlier to external contributors.
You may overlook projects which are a better fit in terms of functionality.
You may deal with projects that are complex and difficult to deal with.

Rationale

Developers “scratching their own itches” tend to be more motivated: the easiest, most straightforward way to make a good contribution is to improve something you already use.

Previous use of a FLOSS project tends to facilitate your work as a contributor because you may be aware of existing features, bugs and enhancements that are necessary.

Of course, the nice thing is that your contributions will also be available for others to use. If your contribution proves to be useful to other people, it is even better. After all, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” , and you can use the community feedback to improve your contribution.

Known Uses

The second author was working on a system to automatically create and configure user accounts, in the beginning of each academic semester, for the students, professors and staff of a university . However, sometimes it was necessary to create new user accounts in the middle of semester, and the original system was not user-friendly enough to be used on day-to-day operations by the support team. We were already using phpLDAPadmin, a user-friendly, web-based LDAP browser and manager, to browse and search user accounts. However, it did not provide a reliable mechanism to allow the creation of user accounts according to predefined configurations. Instead of creating a front-end for our system, we preferred to adapt phpLDAPadmin to our needs, using our knowledge as users, therefore contributing to the project.

Pinpoint is an interesting presentation software: instead of requiring a WYSIWYG interface for designing presentations, it uses a simple plain text file format, what makes it perfect for keeping presentations under version control. After the first author started using Pinpoint for authoring slide presentations, some bugs led him to start contributing to the project.

Planner is the GNOME software for project management. In a graduate course with an assignment that required selecting a free software project to contribute with, one team selected Planner because the members have been using it for several years. The students were concerned with Planner and its low-activity community. They thought that by contributing with Planner, software longevity could be extended.

When you decide to Walk on Familiar Ground, you may have no specific requirements for features you need or technologies you know in mind. However, you may have to deal with one of two scenarios: the project you use either adopts technologies you already know or technologies that you will have to learn.

In the former case, you should consider to Look Inside Your Tool Box and analyse the pros and cons of working with already known technologies.

More likely, though, is that your familiarity with a software that you already use will lead you to Explore a Brave New World. In this case, you should ponder whether you are willing or not to learn new technologies and deal with the problems that may arise when configuring your environment.

What Next

As a user, you may have installed the software by using an installer or a binary package. Therefore, your environment might lack dependencies needed to develop the software (e.g., compilers and libraries). In this case, Do a Mock Installation to make sure you have everything you need to get started with the code.

You may also Look for TODO Lists to check if there are contributions that you are able to perform.