Ask HN: Best OSS Projects for Beginning Contributors

My first step is to find projects that would be a good fit. The students who are most interested are dev bootcamp grads who want to build portfolio pieces. They know the basics of (generally) Rails, Node and Git, but need experience in a bigger codebase than what you find in example bootcamp projects.

So what projects are appropriate? Is there a way to discover them algorithmically so that there is never a shortage of meaningful work for students?

I used the Github API to generate this list: http://upward.io/help

These are projects that have no readme, but have decent ongoing commits. What are other ways to identify projects that have low-hanging fruit for would-be contributors?

OpenMRS was my first true OSS introduction, even though at the time I knew nothing about java. It's in my field of choice, and large enough I got some decent mentorship and appropriate projects. Doesn't hurt that they also regularly participate in GNOME/FOSSOPW, so I knew there would be people interesting and willing to mentor.

Either that or the project owners/maintainers have a lot of pride.

Even if you overlook that getting code that matches a projects style guides might be rarer than it should be refactoring (at least in most cases that I need to deal with it) requires a good understanding of how everything fits together and a better idea of how it should work. There are some simple cases in which this might not be the case at all, such as grouping together a whole bunch of copypasta style code, but even under those circumstances any refactoring is likely to yield a fair bit of work for the maintainer to verify (regressions/style/changed organization) with fairly limited benefit.

As such it doesn't really seem that effective to try to impose something like this on a project without a good justification. If a good justification can be made, then sure refactor away, but otherwise the maintainer would logically think that the work was a waste of everyone's time.