Comment by nurettin

This has been my experience in the early 2000 with sourceforge. You went to the related irc channel, introduced yourself, asked for access and they would add you to the project. You could work on a game that you liked, a jabber client, and even code::blocks at some point. Boost (c++ libraries ) was more serious, you'd have to create the implementation and documentation according to their format and post it to the forum, then they would ask you to defend certain parts or reject due to bloat/DRY/unnecessary.

Everything felt more like a community effort back then.