Advice on open source projects?

Question

Hello everyone,

If possible I'd like a few suggestions on open source projects to direct my attention towards.
I'm a fourth year student computer science. I have a decent knowledge of the programming principles etc. quite skilled in Java but relatively unfamiliar with most other programming languages (altough I could get away with programming in C+, Perl, VB,...) I have zero experience with Python but frankly I'm willing to do my fair share of research and learning etc. so the programming languages required are not that much of a hurdle.

So what I'd like from you guys are some suggestions of good, solid open source projects which are - despite being on a good track and thus not completely infantile - still somewhat low on contributors...I'd like a project on which my help can actually make a notable difference....(so I'd rather not work on huge projects like Ubuntu, Drupal,...) a big plus would be if the project was well documented (clear code writing conventions, an easy introduction for beginners etc. ...)

Anyway, I tried to do my fair share of googling (I also checked out the projects supported by The Google Summer of Code, to see the ones worth attention, but it was hard to weed out the ones outside of my interest, so instead I've come here with my query). I greatly appreciate any input and thank you for the time invested in answering this question.

Have a nice day.

Answer 1

How about VLC media player. It is already a great media player but need really good themes to stick your eyes on. And easy access playlist function would be great in it.

Answer 2

James is open source mail server/Mailet container - I was thinking it would be nice if someone added the ability to have it write incoming mail onto a jms queue as opposed to a spool. This would be extremely useful feature.

Answer 3

Have you looked at Sourceforge? http://www.sourceforge.net/