It's somewhat more important to me (because I'm experienced) to find the right project vs a random issue in one of many projects... I don't have trouble thinking of open source projects to contribute to, but I work in a big co and not super interested in trying to edit something like firefox because the community is too large.<p>I would prefer something like who's hiring but for volunteer work where projects say look, I have this kind of side project, or we have this smaller company, we use this stuff, we'd love to have a competent C++ person (sub your language of choice) to fix this (Windows build/annoying bug/move us to an awesomer version of a third party/rewrite the docs), in exchange, we're ready to have a short like 10mn 1:1 over IRC or email or something to help you get started. And then I'd feel like I can really bring something to the table, I suppose.<p>Most projects say "come hang out in our channel" or "just start with one of the beginner issues"... but it's a little intimidating to go to a new channel and not know what to say and walk in on people being already friendly insiders just to get a task. And I never know if it's socially OK to pick an issue in the tracker and post and say I'll fix it... what if I hit a problem or it turns out to be more than I could chew at this point in time, etc.
I don't understand how a site like this really helps people find something that they're interested in, which has a good community, and is something that they would specifically want to be involved in. It just looks like data overload to me and it biases everything towards the ultra-large projects which for new contributors can be overwhelming (unless said project has a lot of effort in mentoring/on-boarding/etc).<p>I'm not sure how you would present the information on this site in a way which would better lead to quality interactions between newcomers and existing projects, but as it stands it comes off to me as a jumbled list.
What I'm trying to do to get experience working on other people's code is get the people I know who are trying to build their portfolios to farm issues and so on out to each other. I know a guy who's working on an RSS feed reader and ran into a bug he doesn't feel like fixing, I have a Rails app that needs styling, we work on each other's projects.<p>It's probably worse than finding big open-source projects to contribute to, but that's intimidating enough that none of us have done it.
Not affiliated (nor previously familiar) with CodeTriage, but I see a number of "I wish it did X" responses already and thought it was worth pointing out that their About page links to the repo for CodeTriage itself: <a href="https://github.com/codetriage/codetriage" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/codetriage/codetriage</a><p>They have over 100 contributors, so it seems likely they'd appreciate your issue or pull request.
After trying to help a project on the triage site... there needs to be a troll or toxicity level indicating which github projects should be avoided for obvious reasons.