Which open source project to work on?

What is the motivation?

• Do you get paid for it? - Then probably you are told which project(s) to work on.
• Are you passionate about it?

• To "show off"? Probably won't work. Find the passion!
• To learn a new language or technique.
• To learn the social interaction.
• To "give back" to the world.

There are people who work at some company that happens to develop an open source product (e.g. GitLab, Wordpress) or an open source library (e.g. a driver to their own proprietary database). In this case the people working on open source do so because that's what they were told to do. They get paid for their work. In many cases these project have two version control systems and two bug-tracking systems. One internal to the company where they might discuss requests from clients and their own priorities. Then there is the public VCS with its public issue-tracker.

Other people work on open source projects because they are passionate about them. They might have built a solution for themselves that caught on and now they keep maintaining and developing that piece of software. They might have used an open source project written by others, but wanted to make improvements or just wanted to "give back".

There are others who think that contributing to open source will help them with their career. I have been promoting this idea for many years, so do the people in the Maakaf community and probably elsewhere. There were various efforts (e.g. Google Summer of code) to get more people introduced to the world of open source contribution. These programs usually manage to get people make some contributions, but as far as I can tell very few of the participants became long-term open source contributors. Once the monetary incentive was gone, very few retained the passion. So while I still think that contributing to open source can help with your career (e.g. by gaining experience), these days I think that you need to work on your motivation, on your passion to contribute. To see that your volunteer contribution makes the world a better place.