7
votes
Volunteer software developers for open source projects
Where do you find volunteers to help with open source projects? Such as:
For example, with KeenWrite, I'm looking for help help with a specific feature that could be applicable to a wide audience (i.e., academia and technical writers). The lion's share of the effort for cross-references would be an extension or change to the flexmark-java library: parsing a de facto standard cross-reference syntax, rather than direct changes to my text editor.
You may wish to ask in fediverse, most open source folk are there. Look for a suitable instance (not mastodon.social because you will drown in the noise due to spam it gets). Fosstodon might be a good spot to start!
We post our project on a public thing - GitHub/GitLab. Then we open the bugs for ourselves. Then, we hype our project (blog, tweet, etc) and that gets us eyeballs. Eventually someone finds it and maybe wants to help. We hope they pick the bugs we'd like but usually, folk have their own set of bugs they want fixed. There is not a huge supply of folk just waiting to fix bugs for free.