[peterwwillis]

Two different kinds of open source projects are relevant to a resume. Group projects, and individual projects. A hiring manager will want to see both. If you only have an individual project, it's still better than nothing, and there is no color/gender/economic barrier to just writing code for yourself and uploading it to GitHub.

I had joined several group projects, and started one of my own, back when I was first getting into the job market. It helped a lot to tell any employer that you had been fiddling with this new-fangled "Linux" and "Apache" and "MySQL" stuff for years, versus the older Unix guys who had been using the same industry tech for 10 years. Really, open source was just like a new fad to older hiring types, and knowing something about it meant you had a different mindset.

But now everybody uses GitHub and it means jack shit.