Perform simple tasks to help out growing projects
Learn new skills and put old ones to good use by involving yourself in community projects.
Projects that you can donate time todescription of project and how you can help
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LibriVox - Record an audiobook
no experience or audition required, all you need is your voice, some free software on your computer, and maybe an inexpensive microphone. You can choose to read either an entire work or a single chapter and not only will you be helping give literature and learning to Blind people, provide in-car entertainment to millions of commuters and those of us that work with our hands something to listen to as we toil, but you'll also be having fun and practising skills which can look good on your CV.
Everything is crowd-managed via friendly and welcoming Forum. |
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Project Gutenberg - Distributed ProofreadersHelp convert Public Domain books into e-books. The site works by showing volunteers a scanned image alongside the OCR digitized text, users then correct errors and submit the page which is compared against other users work for quality control and verification.
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Helping with this is made great fun by the quality user interface which includes project tracking, activity statistics and a user ranking system, they've even made quality control fun as users can 'level up' and gain access to higher, and harder levels of content by submitting good quality work units. A great skill to have on your CV if you hope to find proofreading work or anything involving written text.
Wikipedia - Writing and Editing ArticlesImprove the accuracy, scope and quality of Wikipedia articles by finding sources, adding facts and improving descriptions. It may seem a daunting task at first but work your way in slowly by making simple modifications to pages on the 'improvement needed' section and soon you'll find yourself a fully involved wikipedian.
T get started o often simply googling a credible source and linking it with the relevant tags will be enough to upgrade an articles quality. |
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You might even count yourself as helping double if you're adding useful facts to wikipedia pages about open source and FLOS :D
Open Street Map - Enter map dataMake sure your local area is properly represented on the open street map by reporting errors or adding information and tagging the location of things like letter boxes, pubs, or footpaths. They've got a full and detailed beginners guide so learning how to get involved is as simple as can be.
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Remember the data you add to open street map is useful to more than just the one website, because of it's open licencing many projects interface with osm. The better quality the information available to app designers the better and more useful they can make their programs, whether it's an app to guide you to the closest pub or a complex analysis of old church locations - these things are only possible in the open source world if people like us take the time to add them to the maps.
VoxforgeOpen source speech recognition programs are forced to used closed data simply because there isn't any good open data available - this obviously is limiting the availability and usefulness of speech recognition in linux.
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Controlling a computer by speech is a life altering ability for many people; it allows disabled or vision impaired users to have control of their computer, access to the internet and many other vital functions. With the ability to openly develop and forward these technologies the open source community might create many useful and helpful things. And all you need to do to help is record a few audio samples!
One Laptop Per Child - Write TextbooksA project based around producing free digital textbooks to include with the one laptop per child project. They need people to help them create open textbooks which will be included pre-installed and openly on-line - contribute as a writer, fact checker, editor, layout designer, illustrator, or virtually anything else involved in textbook making.
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They also need people to write short questions similar to the ones we all remember from our textbooks 'Jon has sixteen apples and eats ten, what has Jon got now?' Bellyache... This can be a quick and rewarding way of contributing to the world changing efforts of open source.
Open Font Library - Design FontsNot as tricky as it may sound, the library has a detailed guide on getting started to ease you into the process and various tasks which require very little real skill with which you can practice participating.
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Many of the font packages in their repository are lacking the stylizations required in many European languages, by adding simple dashes and lines above the relevant letters you can help to greatly increase the scope of the website. They also have large collection of old and out of copyright fonts which need to be copied into a digital format before they can be used, this is a brilliant task for someone wishing to learn the basics of font design and sharing. Or if you're feeling creative make something awesome from scratch, only your imagination limits you.
Creative Commons - TranslateHelp spread the word about creative commons all over the world by helping with their translation project.
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http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Translate
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Wikiotics - create language lessonsnot investigated, looks alpha
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http://wikiotics.org/
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pretty sure this is the program i tried out ages ago, looks much advanced - will look into it further
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http://www.chamilo.org/
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Open Hatch - OS small jobs board, mostly codingnot had much chance to look into this yet, seems to be a nice little system for matching coders who want something to get involved up to projects which require their skills. Maybe i'll move this into a 'coders' section when i get round to that.
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this thread has some interesting links for me to go through and extrapolate http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/xkek6/what_piece_of_software_could_i_work_on_that_best/