Even if you no coding skills at all, don’t let that stop you from finding a way to lend a hand because there’s always something that needs to get done. Project leads will help match your skills and interests to their todo list and you could end up doing anything from testing an app for bugs to touching up artwork and logos.

Here are a few projects looking for volunteers right now:

Ikasan is a Java-based middleware platform that was recently open sourced by a banking institution and needs Java developers to help take the project to the next level.

SourceForge community member wek21 is looking for people with Qt or KDE-related programming skills to help put together a desktop applet for Plasma that notifies users when friends update their social networking sites.

Graphic artists might want to hit up isaque to help create artwork for the task manager project, Coyote.

There are a bunch of things to do over at the auction script project WeBid, including help finishing the payment system and “making the front end less ugly.”

Twincling, a repository of open source software developed by an India-based technology company, is looking for PHP programmers to work on two projects; -dmod and -scano.

You can always find the latest volunteer help wanted ads on our forums.

I’m very pleased with this year’s finalists! I have become familiar with a lot of fantastic projects that I didn’t know before, and I hope you will too. Every single project in our list deserves to win.

Finalists like Sahana, a disaster management framework, TriSano, an outbreak management application for infectious disease, and AgepaBase, a tool that helps governments plan infrastructure for clean drinking water, are what I was secretly hoping to see this year.

The recently-infamous rtmpdump project is a finalist in Best Project for Multimedia. If you don’t know the back story, hit up Google…but let’s just say that I wholeheartedly appreciate the “screw the man” sentiment, even if “the man” includes us this time. The world is not a perfect place quite yet.

Finally, PortableApps.com is a finalist in a lot of categories. A lot. Those of you who were paying attention last year may be experiencing deja vu, but something tells me they’re not going to let it slip through their fingers in 2009.

Here’s a final graph of the nominations over time:

You might be wondering why it’s taken so long for us to tally, and there are two reasons.

First, since we allowed nominations for any open source project, we couldn’t build a database ahead of time that was comprehensive enough that people could nominate projects by searching for them. Instead, we asked our nominators to provide URLs and names for their projects. Piles and piles of random perl scripts, a bunch of SQL code, and an awful lot of processing by hand ensured that we knew when http://foo.sourceforge.net, http://sourceforge.net/projects/fo, and http://foo.org were all the same project (and, incidentally, ensured that we removed spam and non-FOSS projects.)

Second, we wanted to do something a bit different this year with the voting process. Instead of just a bunch of select boxes where voters could pick their favorite projects, we wanted it to be a way for them to discover something new! So we asked each of our finalists (and a couple of alternates per category) to send us a bit of information about their project and, optionally, to record a video that would introduce you to their team. A lot of our finalists did, too!

(As an aside, I wrote a Rails-based mini-CRM to keep track of which projects were finalists and alternates in their categories, collect all the data about them, and generate the hundreds of emails I had to send during the process. I had to do something to keep it from being tedious, didn’t I?)

Best of luck to all of the finalists!

Cya,
Ross

He’s absolutely right since, of course, there are few industries that can’t be improved by introducing open source software. One recent winner of SourceForge’s Project of the Month, ZK, is a an Ajax Java framework that makes it a snap to develop mobile apps. Of course, ZK isn’t the only project that’s focused on mobile devices. Here are a few more:

PicView - Put this picture viewer on your cell phone, then add your favorite photos to take with you wherever you go. The next time someone asks to see a picture of your kids, pets, or new car, you’ll be ready.

jsdbfs - Here’s a tiny JavaScript library designed for Mobile Safaru that stores CSS, HTML, JavaScript, or images in your phone’s local HTML 5 database so Web apps load faster.

PHP Gmail - This is an unofficial API for mobile Gmail that provides a base for Web apps that interact with Gmail.

nVMGc - Save all your SMS messages forever by converting them to text files or database rows and sending them to your PC for safekeeping.

Mobile Money Manager - A financial management app for mobile phones that transfers OFX formatted data to your computer.

Bloody Mess - Fend off monsters with this top-down shooter game based on the popular PC game Crimsonland. Even if you’re not a gamer, you should grab it just for the awesome name.

After you’ve taken peek at AutoAP, take a spin through this handful of Wi-Fi related projects that are also worth getting to know:

goText - Use it to send free SMS messages over Wi-Fi and also GPRS, EDGE, and UMTS. Written in J2ME, it works on virtually any Java-enabled mobile phone.

anyRemote - Turn your cellphone into a remote PC controller and use it to play games and manage your video or audio files right from the sofa.
Growmanager - Water and feed your plants with Growmanager. If have a really green thumb, you can even use it to monitor soil moisture or manage heating and cooling systems in your greenhouse.

MisterHouse - If you’re really into Wi-Fi, go for broke and mange your entire house with this app. Program your hardware to open and close your blinds, turn lights on and off, program your VCR, and pretty much anything else you can come up with and code an action for.

Like many projects hosted at SourceForge, the Silex team is spread out all over the place. Ten members gave more than a month of their time recently to meet in Paris and work full-time — without pay — getting Silex ready for its next release. Talk about dedication! Once you’re done getting the scoop on Silex at this month’s POTM page, you need to visit the project’s blog. Even though it’s written primarily in French, there’s no mistaking the energy and enthusiasm of this team.

A caveat: the folks who commented on my previous post were correct. Nominators who aren’t logged in to SourceForge are asked to provide their email address. If they don’t click on the link we send them, their nomination doesn’t count when we tally everything up. This graph contains the number of submitted nominations, not the number of valid nominations. The last time I checked, about 80% of the submitted nominations had been validated.

We’re preparing to send out another email, this time to all SourceForge users, reminding them that our nomination phase is coming to a close. I’ll report back with another graph after we send it.

We shouldn’t have worried! It’s been 10 days since we started accepting nominations and we’ve already received over 20,500:

You may be wondering what caused that explosion at about noon on the 13th. That was when we sent an email to all SourceForge project administrators suggesting that they nominate their own projects and ask their communities to do the same.

Here’s what’s interesting about that, though: the links in that email contained hashes we used to correlate the nominations they made with their SourceForge user account. The nominations directly related to the emails, therefore, are counted on the yellow line labeled “sf users”. That line plateaued relatively quickly after the email was delivered, which is to be expected…but then something unintuitive happened: Nominations for non-authenticated users grew at an even more accelerated rate after the email. Since those users weren’t directly affected by the email, I expected their activity to remain mostly flat.

So what does that mean? It means that, while many nominations were made because of the email we sent, the majority of them were caused by the subsequent word-of-mouth from project administrators to their communities. Good job, project admins! Keep getting the word out, it’s working.

After taking a small break to tally, we’ll announce the finalists on June 22nd and kick off the final vote. The winners will be revealed on July 23 during our infamous party at OSCON…but if you can’t make it, we’ll also be broadcasting the event online. Happy nominating!

Traditionally, we use the sitewide update to talk about what we’ve recently done, and we don’t talk much about what’s in progress. This month, we’re breaking that tradition because some of what we’re planning to do is ambitious enough that we’d like to tell you about it ahead of time.

Next week, we’re launching a revised look-and-feel for the site. I think the look we adopted a while ago certainly got everyone’s attention, and now it’s time to move on to something a little less jarring. Although some of you may miss it’s orange-ness when it’s gone, we suspect that a good number of you will breathe a sigh of relief. One thing is for sure: you’ll certainly notice the new one when it goes live. We hope you find the change refreshing.

Beyond next week, our strategy gets a lot more aggressive than that.

The SourceForge community has two high-level categories of user behavior: open source development and consumption. Developers want an easy-to-use, elegant, functional interface with more data and less fluff; consumers would prefer a visually uncomplicated site with project ratings, comparisons, and a straightforward download process.

Today, we have one site that serves both developers and consumers, even though their needs are vastly different. The end result of our current approach is that it’s very hard to give them both what they want, but we’ve got something in mind that we think will make everyone’s experience a lot better.

We’re going to split what is now the SourceForge.net website into two completely new, separate experiences: one focused on software development and the other focused on consumption. It’s not going to happen immediately, but we want it to happen soon. Most of the details are still being worked out, naturally - but if you’ve got any thoughts, feel free to email me at my address below.

Oh! We also plan to kick off our 2009 Community Choice Awards program next week. In the meantime, start thinking about the projects you think should win!

Until next time,

Ross Turk (ross at sf.net)
Director of Community

This month’s Project of the Month winner is DOSBox, a free and open source DOS-emulator that lets you run classic games on any platform. To learn more about it, read an interview with the team behind DOSBox, and be sure to check out the advice they give to projects that are just starting out.