Welcome readers, it is that time of the week I drop an article in the Open-source series.

To stay as an open-source contributor means you have to be recognized with an open-source community or communities as the case may be. Contributing to open-source is not just about contributing to the projects on Github, you learn more about the project and community by joining the community platform which can be slack, discord, zulip etc. These platforms make it easier for the community members to chat and ask questions.

These communities support projects and empower open-source teams to write better, code better, drive engagement and grow sustainable ecosystems. Not to mention that the way to effective contribution is to be vocal about all of your thoughts in the community and ask as many questions as possible on the chat platforms and during the meetings. This will make you be actively involved in the community. In this article, I will be sharing seven amazing open-source communities you can join and contribute to their projects as a beginner.

1. Layer5

The Layer5 community represents the largest collection of service mesh projects and their maintainers in the world. Layer5 projects establish industry standards and enable service developers, owners, and operators with repeatable patterns and best practices for managing all aspects of distributed services. They have the largest collection of service mesh practitioners and maintainers of leading open source projects, they are open source contributors and maintainers.

Layer5 projects are open-source software. Anyone can download, use, work on, and share it with others. It's built on principles like collaboration, globalism, and innovation. Layer5 projects are distributed under the terms of Apache v2.

They build projects to provide learning environments, deployment and operational best practices, performance benchmarks, create documentation, share networking opportunities, and more. Their shared commitment to the open-source spirit pushes Layer5 projects forward. Details to how to get involved with Layer5 here

2. CHAOSS

CHAOSS is an open-source project at the Linux Foundation focused on creating analytics and metrics to help define community health. Work in the CHAOSS Project community is largely organized around software and metrics. Additionally, user groups provide ways to consider how software and practices can support the deployment of CHAOSS metrics.

The CHAOSS project develops metrics, practices, and software for making open source project health more understandable. By building measures of open source project health, CHAOSS seeks to improve the transparency and actionability of open source project health so that relevant stakeholders can make more informed decisions about open source project engagement.

The goal of the working groups is to refine the metrics and to work with software implementations. The workgroups are built around categories of metrics that CHAOSS has identified. The working groups are:

• Common Metrics

• Diversity and Inclusion

• Evolution

• Risk

• Value

• App Ecosystem

The CHAOSS project is funded in part through a grant from the Alfred P. Soan Foundation. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation does not support, endorse, or otherwise certify the results of foundation-supported work. Details to how to get involved with CHAOSS project here

3. Open Source Community Africa

Open Source Community Africa (OSCA) is for open-source lovers, enthusiasts, advocates and experts within and across Africa with the sole aim of increasing the rate of credible contributions by African software developers, designers, writers and everyone involved in the sphere of technology to open source projects both locally and globally, changing the perception of Africans from just the billion users to the NEXT BILLION CREATORS.

They are a diverse community of open-source lovers, collaborating on different projects to make a difference across Africa.

Oscafrica is currently achieving this through the following vehicles;

OSCA Chapters, Open Source Festival and through featured open source projects.

Oscafrica main goal is to create an atmosphere in which Africans not only use software and hardware but are also creators of these technologies. Details to how to get involved with OSCA here

4. EddieHub

An Open Source community aimed at encouraging and promoting communication, best practices and technical expertise in an inclusive and welcoming environment

Eddie has always believed in giving back to the tech community with a particular focus on creating and supporting opportunities for those wanting to start a career in tech, through diversity and inclusion programmes. This started out by mentoring and delivering workshops in association with tech for good charities, to create and build the EddieHub Community. Details to how to get involved with here

5. Facebook Open-source

Facebook Open source believe open-source is a chance for everyone to share their work and the challenges they are working to solve: challenges of speed, complexity, and deploying at scale.

They are doing this out in the open; sharing their research, their code, their hardware, and their design approach with others in the industry. Engaging with the community promotes thought-leadership and encourages talented people of all backgrounds to think about contributing their ideas and effort to moving the world forward.

Facebook Open-source Developer Advocate once said

We knew that we were going to be really active in the open-source space, because of both the community aspect and the technologies that we had to share. We’re getting developers across the industry, different perspectives, diverse perspectives. We love to see the growth of developers. It’s social, and we’re a social company.

Details to how to get involved with Facebook Open-source here

6. GNOME

GNOME is led by the non-profit GNOME Foundation. Their board is democratically elected, and technical decisions are made by the engineers doing the work. They are supported by many organizations; employees from over a hundred companies have contributed since the project began.

They believe that software should be developed in the open. Their development infrastructure and communication channels are public, and their code can be freely downloaded, modified, and shared with others. All their contributors have the same rights. Details to how to get involved with GNOME here

7. Google Open Source

Google believes that open source is good for everyone. By being open and freely available, it enables and encourages collaboration and the development of technology, solving real-world problems.

At Google, they have always used open source to innovate. They want to give something back; they enjoy being a part of the community. They often release code to push the industry forward or share the best practices they developed. But sometimes, it's just fun and interesting code. The list of projects they have released and contributed to is long and continues to grow.

Google understands that to be a part of the open-source community, they need to give back. Through their financial support and student outreach programs, they aim to keep the ecosystem strong. Details to how to get involved with Goggle Open Source here

Conclusion

These are some communities you could get started with. The projects are maintained by a lot of people who are always ready to help. Not only that, but the open-source community is huge and there are people which will help you whenever you get stuck. So get going! You've got this!

I'm sure there are other amazing open-source communities, you can also drop anyone you know that is not mentioned here. I'd love to know more too and it will be helping other beginners too.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, see(write) you next week.