EthanStark.com - a tech-y blog

🧑🏽‍💻🌅 Coding for a Cause

Ways To Contribute to Open Source, for Social Good

DALL-E 3 prompt: Create an illustration for a blog post that represents a person coding for social good. The image should depict an individual at a computer, with code on the screen that includes icons or visual elements related to climate change, health, education, and equality. The atmosphere should be inspiring, with a sense of positivity and impact, possibly including a globe, a heart, a book, and balanced scales, all integrated into a harmonious and technological design.

When I've been mentoring folk who are learning the craft of software development, I'll often encourage them to seek out open source projects to contribute to, so they can get some experience contributing to a larger codebase.

It's tricky, though, since there are SO MANY barriers in finding projects that are accessible to new contributors.

GitHub just launched For Good First Issue, a curated list of open source projects recognized as digital public goods that need help.

That said, the site itself looks very young, and doesn't list very many repos.

So here are a few more resources for seeking out a "good first issue" to contribute to open source software.