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nickjoedaly
nickjoedaly

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Find an Open Source Project to Contribute To

1) How to label your projects so people can find them, and,
2) how to find projects you wish to contribute to (via a mini walk through the search process.)

Hey everyone. First timer here. I was looking through github to try to find a #hacktoberfest project to contribute to and found myself unable to search for multiple topics simultaneously. Seemed like a big deal to me considering this is the month to get projects noticed and, as a newbie, I cared more about finding topics or causes that really excited me more so than searching by task/bug.

What I learned:

Your quickest bet for searching for projects within #hacktoberfest2018 is simply to go to the topic page and then enter a search query in the search bar such as #music. The autopoulated dropdown in the searchbar will give you the option to search 'in this topic'. This is a quick workaround and will save hours of time browsing for issues and causes and then trying to see if they are tagged and participating in #hacktoberfest2018. This brings about my call to action: please generously tag your hacktoberfest2018 projects with other in order to help people contribute to projects

(Aside- this all took place at a live meetup during which even one of the coordinators had the same issue and didn't know how to search topically)

This raises multiple questions:

1) How can github refine their search function to be more intuitive for searching multiple topic searches without going into an advanced search?

2) What is an intuitive way to refine a search query on github?

3) What other basic functionalities are currently obstacles to participation in #hacktoberfest2018 for non-tech-savvy contributors?

Hope that gets the ball rolling about optimizing search functionality for more human use.

Thanks.
-Nick

Top comments (1)

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pandaa880 profile image
Prashant Chaudhari

I had a same problem but luckily I found some sites which helps you to find issues by different filters.

Check these sites, I hope you will find it useful.

To get more information about open source and contribution, I recommend freeCodeCamp guide for Open Source. It is well structured and useful information, specially for beginners.

freeCodeCamp - How to Contribute to Open Source.