Or... ways you've contributed recently that you may not be aware of.
There are lots of ways to contribute to open source. Here are a few that might fit with the work you're doing and will qualify your participation in this FOSS Fund voting.
One of the quickest ways to evaluate contribution opportunities on Github, without requiring a lot of up-front information is to sort by the 'good first issue' tag.
As a contributor... look for this label in projects you use, or find a good first issue in a project that matches your interests and skillset. Simple instructions here.
As a project maintainer or administrator...review existing tasks and bugs and for those that should take less than 2 hours, add this label. This a great service to the project as a way to bring in more people, and of course, a great contribution!
Depending on the project, if you have experienced a bug in an open source project that you work with:
- Check to see if that issue is already reported, confirm that this also happens on your end. Add any other details you think might be missing or helpful.
- Report it! That's a contribution!
We put a lot of emphasis on contributing code, but did you know one of the greatest things we can do is to help maintainers by validating the contributions of others? Here are three ways to do that:
- See if you can duplicate an issue reported by someone else. If you validate an issue, add any additional context, steps or observations that might be missing or otherwise feel important.
- Validate that a PR fixes an issue as intended. Merge a PR into the related version and test. Update the PR comments with your test outcome.
- Updating issues, or tasks with additional information that helped you test, or work through the solution.
Writing and updating documentation is a very valuable contribution. A few options might be:
- Look for an component you use on Microsoft Docs, review and improve the documentation if you can, or make suggestions.
- Contribute to web developer knowledge through MDN Web Docs.
- Update any OSS onboarding project documentation like 'how to get involved' to be clearer, and up-to-date.
- Translate documentation to another language.
Are you already on a board driving change in the open ecosystem? Are you meeting regularly, sharing your knowledge and advice? This is an ongoing contribution.
Good work!
Helping users is a fantastic contribution, and the faster you can support users when they are stuck the better for the quality of the project and retention of those users. Some quick examples:
- Look for forums, or discussion boards where users report issues,and answer what you can.
- Look for Tweets about bugs, or (sincere, not trolling) negative experiences that you might be able to help with.
Diversity is what happens when you are building an inclusive and equitable community. Here are a few ways you can contribute to that outcome.
- Review this 'open source inclusion basic checklist' and make any change to a project you lead, or contribute to. If you don't have the authority, or access consider opening an issue on that project instead.
- Do you speak about open technology and projects in any capacity? Podcasts, remote-conferences, blog posts all count as contributions.