If you're just starting out, you could try one of the big projects that have a well established community and guiding processes/mentors to help you out. I've b

If you're just starting out, you could try one of the big projects that have a well established community and guiding processes/mentors to help you out. I've been a Fedora Project contributor for about two years and it's been great. They have a lot of very different ways of contributing and a lot of different projects. I contribute to the Infrastructure team; almost all of Fedora's infrastructure is built and maintained by the Fedora community. There are a lot of apps, APIs and they all communicate with one another: build service, accounts system, updates management, package database etc. Most of them are python TurboGears apps. I'm also a package maintainer and that's another great way to learn how different open source projects work and interact with upstreams. Being a package maintainer is a lot more fun and challenging than it would appear. It's also a great way to find out other projects to contribute to. There's a lot of information about contributing on this page: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Join http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Join and you can feel free to ask me more here or in private.