I really can't give very good advice, but I'll try to say something... There are several different types of open source projects and I'm not quite sure which k

I really can't give very good advice, but I'll try to say something... There are several different types of open source projects and I'm not quite sure which kind you're looking for. Firstly there are a lot of (often hugely popular) tools used by researchers that don't involve research directly. A good example is Jupyter (formerly known as ipython notebooks). Contributing to these projects is sure be of benefit to many people (probably more than anything else you could do), and may be a good place to learn skills because they're more likely to have good codebases written by skilled programmers. But if the project is already too large (like Jupyter), it may be a lot harder to get into. Next up, anything that's scientific and written in javascript is most likely to be for user interface, visualisation, or just websites (PR) for research projects. For example interactive visualisations of algorithms. May or may not involve actual involvement to the research. For example I went to a seminar recently by a group of researchers here who create models for simulating the effects of policy changes for policy makers a number of government departments here. They need user interfaces for their tools, and for one project [1] apparently they're using something that generates forms on a webpage, but it's all written in Java and R, and they want to open source everything and get external contributions (the current code they have up is 2 years old). I'm not advertise them, just giving an example; there must be a number of other projects with similar needs. I don't know how you can find find them. Finally, there may be projects that actually write the real meat of the research software directly in javascript. It sounds like this is what you want. But I don't think javascript is a popular language amongst researchers. Languages like MATLAB/Octave, Python, R, Mathematica, Magma/GAP, C, Java, Julia are mostly used. Checking my CS department's mailing list, the only mention of javascript is a project to write a Google Chrome extension to use the javascript API for an eye tracker [2] [1]: http://www.arts.auckland.ac.nz/en/about/our-research/research-centres-and-archives/compass/compass-projects/a-modelling-tool-to-improve-the-policy-response-on-issues-concerning-children-and-young-people.html http://www.arts.auckland.ac.nz/en/about/our-research/researc... [2]: https://theeyetribe.com/products/ https://theeyetribe.com/products/