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Check Out Some Projects Looking for Volunteers

If you love open source and have some extra time on your hands, why not consider volunteering to help out one of the projects hosted on SourceForge? You don’t need mad developer skills to pitch in, most projects will welcome volunteers with all levels of experience.

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.

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CCAs: Finalists Announced, Voting Begins

Our call for nominations for the 2009 Community Choice Awards officially ended on May 29th. Our finalists were chosen from 47,887 nominations for 4,875 distinct projects, which is well over double the number we got in 2008. Voting has officially started, as of right now…so go vote at http://sourceforge.net/cca with the greatest reasonable level of urgency.

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

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