I want to contribute to the open source community, but my first experience has left me a little bummed. Up until this point I have had success contributing to my own repositories and the repositories of people I know personally outside of GitHub.
I found an open source project that seemed relatively active and spent a good bit of time coming up to speed on the project and their processes. I put together a pull request with a consolidated commit message and test cases and never received a response back after over a month.
There are excellent step-by-step instructions on how to execute a pull request on Stack Overflow like this one: What's the workflow to contribute to an open source project using git pull requests? (eg. via Github)
What I'm interested in is do I need to do anything outside of these instructions to get the pull request accepted without having to waste time coming up to speed only to see the pull request ignored. Should I try to build a rapport with the project owners first and find out what they want people to work on before diving in? Only work on specific issues that are already listed? Or was I just unlucky and should keep trying with other projects?
Contributing to Open Source projects will vary from project to project. The responses will depend on how the particular community is structured and how well it is able to deal with new participants.
In most cases you will need to put in some time to engage with the project to ensure that the trust is built so that you are making useful contributions, and that your contributions are seen as useful.
If the project has a suitable discussion list, have a look back over previous discussions to get a favour of who the key participants are and the prefered style of discussion - it may not be to your taste, if so try elsewhere; but in the main you should start to see opportunities to start a conversation, and then code contributions.
Reviewing the discussions also allows you to see what the normal practice is regarding 'pinging' the list to see if anyone is interested in your submission and how to get reviewed or accepted.
Don't expect that all your contributions will be accepted. It's easy to think that there is some magic that means the other contributors get their code accepted all the time - that's one of the falsities of social media.
Keep plugging away.