One thing I've found is that there is a lot of independence on GitHub. My immediate assumption if I see a project public project on GitHub is that the owner is saying "I'm ready and willing to accept help." The challenge of not knowing where to start is something different.
A lot of projects can be complicated (D3.js comes to mind). If you don't have a really good grasp on a few very key disciplines in math then honestly, before you contribute to D3, you should brush up on that. The system is self regulating in a sense where you have to know enough about the subject to contribute.
Maybe, there should be a section that people add to their README.md that explain what you need to know before you start digging into a project along with a project goal. I know that for my project[1], I want to create an authoritative .gitignore database, but I'm not really clear on that being my goal nor am I clear on where to add your new files. All of the contributors to my repo have figured it out though without me really telling them anything.
> All of the contributors to my repo have figured it out though without me really telling them anything.
It is also true that everyone who didn't figure it out, did not contribute. This is a much bigger problem. Not specific to your project, more of an issue at large, but saying that '100% of people who contributed figured out how to contribute' isn't a grate benchmark for success.
It's not a benchmark for success and I'm going to make a change tomorrow to my repo that lets other know what they can do to contribute. What I don't think is good is people that don't understand what's going on making pull requests when they don't see the vision of the project. So far I have not gotten any of those which tells me that everyone who is making pull requests understands what the point of gitignore.io is.
A lot of projects can be complicated (D3.js comes to mind). If you don't have a really good grasp on a few very key disciplines in math then honestly, before you contribute to D3, you should brush up on that. The system is self regulating in a sense where you have to know enough about the subject to contribute.
Maybe, there should be a section that people add to their README.md that explain what you need to know before you start digging into a project along with a project goal. I know that for my project[1], I want to create an authoritative .gitignore database, but I'm not really clear on that being my goal nor am I clear on where to add your new files. All of the contributors to my repo have figured it out though without me really telling them anything.
[1] - https://github.com/joeblau/gitignore.io