[jfz]

Most people will say that the motivation to work on a problem should come from you being really excited about the problem domain. Play around with someone else's code, trying to do something interesting to you that's just barely on the edge of what the provided code can do. Then, when you realize you just need that one feature to do something awesome, you can write it yourself. Don't contribute to open source because you feel like you should, contribute to open source because you want the project to have the features you're contributing.