[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).