[majelix]

Of these, 1: Chose the project you want to contribute to (and 1.5: Choose the issue to work on) and 9: Follow up are the hard ones. Both are primarily social problems.

For 1, it's mostly about knowing yourself. What projects interest you, and where can you contribute?

For 9, it's convincing the owners that your contribution is a net positive. Start with 2: Check out how to contribute, and proactively reach out so your pull request doesn't come out of the blue.

Oh, and be willing to put your ego aside -- it can be tough to defend your work, particularly if you're a new (and thus haven't built up trust) contributor. It gets easier, both as the project learns to trust you and as you learn the work within their practices.

[boulos]

So actually, I was thinking about #1 the other day as well. When you go to GitHub.com, they now have /explore and /showcases. But, even if you find something interesting (say https://github.com/showcases/open-journalism), it isn't clear that any of those projects are suitable for contribution. Not everyone uses a CONTRIBUTING.md, but even more so, I think many of the showcased projects on GitHub fall into the "Free to make a copy of" not open to contribution.

So I keep coming back to what has been said elsewhere: the best way seems to be to find a bug in something you use, realize it's open source and go from there. That's unfortunately not a great way to mobilize the masses of people that could contribute, but don't have a particular project in mind (think GSoC).