Contributing to Open Source Privacy Projects is Easier Than You Think

I am sure that you reached a point in your career where you get bored by your work from time to time. That's normal, and it happens to everyone. It happens to me most of the time, and initially, I was perturbed, thinking that something was wrong and I was not so enthusiastic enough to contribute to my company's success.

I'll share a life hack with you. It would help if you unlocked your mind by temporarily changing your train of thoughts and creating something new, privacy-related.

What that could be:

• Try to fix a bug or write a few lines of code if you have the skills.
• Update the documentation or create a new piece of it.
• Be part of a discussion where you can share your experience to solve a problem.
• Facilitate or mediate a community-related problem.
• Think about a new feature idea for a product and pitch it to the product team.
• Take a volunteer role (2-3 h a week or less) and help build the product or apply your other skills.
• Localize the content in your language to support the message reach even more people and robots.

What to do next?

I guess if you are reading this, you might need advice on what to do next. Please find below my top three privacy-oriented projects with an active community to help them reach their mission.

OpenMined

OpenMined is an open-source and not-for-profit community of over 11,000 academics, engineers, mentors, educators, ethicists, and privacy enthusiasts committed to making a fairer, more prosperous world by building and teaching privacy-enhancing technologies.

A good starting point is their website and their Github space

TOSDR

Every day you visit new websites and accept their terms of service without even reading them. Am I right? Yes, you do it!

"Terms of Service; Didn't Read" (short: ToS;DR) is a project started in June 2012 to help fix this and convert every website's terms and legal agreements into a human-readable format and grade it on a privacy scale, so you could know best who is doing what with your data.

If you want to help them make the internet world a better place, follow this link to get started.

Privacy Guides

Many organizations are monitoring your online activities. Privacy Guides project is your central privacy and security resource to protect yourself online.

The project teaches you why it matters and provides you with tools and ideas to protect your privacy. Currently, there are more than 100 suggestions on that topic.

If you want to contribute to this great project, their GitHub repo is a good start.

Feed your creativity monster and be happier!

A disclaimer: I am not affiliated with any of those projects, but I support them financially, which you can do too.

The header picture is published under Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) license