Is there a hotlist of projects you developers like? A description and what team is building it? Add a few keywords on what is missing (design-wise) for the project and let me reply on the keyword.
Not really. We all have our source of hot new projects (eg: http://thechangelog.com/) but things we end up using usually come from our own projects / work. From my point of view I see two types of contributions.
The first one is a drive-by contribution. You're using project XY to help reach your goal but it wasn't perfect. The contribution is providing the fix for that. I guess the equivalent for you is that you see the website's using Helvetica and it hurts your eyes so you want to fix it. I would love that kind of contribution but never saw it happen.
The second one is a owned project. It's your baby. I have a couple of those, they're things I think are great and I would like to help them grow. For that I give some of my free time to nurture them. I would love to see a designer adopt them as well and have discussions on the content and form of the documentation or how we could improve the message by changing the design.
I'm not sure if I'm conveying the approach but what I want to say is that it's not really a task list. It should also be your drive-by contribution or a baby. Just choose what you want, no pressure. And let us know if there's anything that we're doing wrong that throws you off.
Good insights. Never thought of it that way, but you're right. Thanks for the changelog link. I'll bookmark it and perhaps I'll contribute. Oh, and great name for a url: http://drivebydesign.com Too bad some squatter already holds it.
Just some last parting words: It also feels really empowering. You see something that is wrong, you can fix it. That is not something you can do with closed software, you have to cope with whatever the vendor has decided to handle the issue.
The closest I've seen to this in the design world is people doing site re-designs and posting them on their own blog. It shows the world an alternative to the existing design but then it's no a direct path to updating the actual site like we could do in software. I wish there was a solution for that.
EDIT: It reminds me, the Amaya browser which only a few have heard of supports of writing back the changes of a page if the server supports it: http://www.w3.org/Amaya/
