If you've ever wanted to get involved in the open source world but didn't quite know where to start, Stefan Koopmanschap has a great guide posted to his blog with some tips on getting yourself out there.

Last week I wrote about how me being active in Open Source helped boost my career in several ways. Now this is all very interesting, but how to go about actually contributing to Open Source. That is the topic of this blog post. How to look for the right project to contribute to, and what ways are there of contributing? Let's have a look.

He looks at things like finding the right project for you and some of the ways that you can give back to that project including:

• Core code/patches
• Plugins
• Documentation
• Promotion
• Deliver presentations
• Support

He expands out each topic mentioning more specifics on what that contribution type entails and even a few examples of projects on some of them.