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?
The EA forum doesn't seem like an obvious best choice. Just because it is related to EA does not make it effective, especially considering the existence of discussion software like Reddit, Discourse, and phpBB.
I'd say it mostly depends on what kind of skills and career capital you are aiming for. There are a number of important (scientific) software packages with either zero or one maintainers, which could be useful to work on either upstream or downstream.
Personally, I am presently just doing (easy) fixes for bugs that I run into myself. But I am considering to either start officially maintaining a driver that I keep patching for my own use anyway or to contribute to some decentralized web project.
It might not be super relevant for you specifically, but I do want to plug Google Summer of Code for all university students of 18 years and older as a wonderful opportunity. (application deadline April 9th)