Contributing to open source projects can do good and build visible career capital. It also doesn't require you to be in a specific location or to work on a specific time schedule. And if you make an improvement, it can be used an infinite amount of times, making for a potentially large impact. Contributions can be everything from writing low-level software to marketing.
The archetype of open source is software like Linux, but if you have thoughts about other types of projects such as Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg and open source architecture, please share them.
There's an abundance of projects to choose from, and tools such as First Timers Only exist to help find the right one for you. But it's not at all clear to me what an effective altruist should do. As an example, OpenAI has 76 repositories on GitHub. Do they want help on any of them? What kind of people are they looking for? Which ones are most neglected? It's hard to tell.
This has been discussed a couple of times before:
But these discussions treat open source contributions only in a very general way.
So, how should an effective altruist go about contributing to open source?
My background: I've worked around tech recruiting for the last three years.
You should probably try to work on whatever open source project is most exciting to you, rather than one that you think will have a positive impact on the world. In my experience, you learn a lot from trying to code things that interest you, especially if you get excited about the project and think about it a lot. I think that the career capital from such projects is quite large, and so the altruistic impact is relatively unimportant.
The exception here is if you're really excited about projects *because* they're altruistic--in that case you should go ahead with them, especially if they're a project you'll still learn from.
FWIW I think that working on the LessWrong/EA forum software is a pretty good choice if you want to learn frontend web development--it uses some cool modern technologies.