I might be wrong, although I have a feeling that recent slowdown of opensource contribution is caused (at least sometimes) by the maintainers/commiters and "cor

I might be wrong, although I have a feeling that recent slowdown of opensource contribution is caused (at least sometimes) by the maintainers/commiters and "core teams" behind projects. You can check HN/Stackoverflow/Proggit/Forums for "how to start contributing to opensource". Answers are similar: find yourself a project, and be active there. But that's not that easy, most of time, due to time and knowledge boundaries. Sometimes it's not like that. There's a lot of friendly people, who encourage newcomers, and realize that if they opensourced something, it's not theirs anymore, it belongs to community. I just wish there were more people who're that friendly and involve more and more team players to get stuff done in their projects. For instance, i have some feature for my product, that requires extension of the framework I'm working with. My actions are following: check whether it's already done -> ok, not done -> build a simple prototype, proof of concept -> go create an issue / start discussion / show your prototype to maintainers or community. So, after the last step most of time i was getting stuck. Either I'm doing stuff in a wrong way, but most of commits that were followed by the same path, weren't getting through. First maintainer sees it, says that we won't do it since that's not in our primary field of interest, and closes the issue. Reopening and trying to involve more people into discussion doesn't lead to the success, since dominated opinion was already stated out, and people tend to agree with people they know and trust. Second approach. Fixing the issues you're facing. You're using some stable version of software (not cutting-edge), and notice that something went wrong. First google request gives you a link to a patch. So, your work is not required anymore. If it didn't, you still should write a unit-test and prove that that stuff was caused by framework, not your software bundle. Having not much or no open source contribution makes that process long. If not - you succeed and provide a patch or wait until someone fixes it in a better way. Third approach. You don't have any features that you lack, and you didn't face any unfixed issues during development. But you want to pay back to the community, since you're thankful. You go to the bug tracker, and try to find a suitable bug for yourself. Often by the time you come up with a prototype, gurus already get it fixed. So, you're out of process again. You should really dive into that and spend long hours to get to know source code very well first, get acquainted with active people there. It's never been easy.