Start by joining our community. It's huge and varied. There are numerous ways for you to help OpenSpending out. They can roughly be categorised into help with development, help with news and web editing, and help with data and data wrangling.

On OpenSpending's community page you can start off by reading about these different ways to contribute:
http://community.openspending.org/contribute/

OpenSpending doesn't only analyse financial transactions with software, the contributors of the OpenSpending community analyse data and blog about them on the Spending blog: http://community.openspending.org/blog

The blog isn't limited to data analysis. It covers everything that has to do with government financials. You can join the news and web editor team to help track down, manage, and contribute stories: http://community.openspending.org/contribute/web/

OpenSpending is all about opening up government financial data around the world. The project needs people to go out there and advocate their government (state and municipalities) to open up the data.

OpenSpending processes and analyses big datasets it can get when governments open up their data. Some of these datasets are badly structured or need extra effort to become usable for software.

OpenSpending has a data team to tackle these problems. You can join the team and help out: http://community.openspending.org/contribute/data/

OpenSpending is a global project and needs to be translated into a lot of different languages. You can help translate OpenSpending into your language (if it hasn't been already) on our Transifex page: https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/openspending/

Presenting huge and complex datasets like all financial transactions of a government is challenging. The project has managed to attract to world wide attention for its approaches but it can always be improved and you can help out! OpenSpending needs web designers who are good at (or like the challenge of) presenting complex information to normal citizens.

On the front page of OpenSpending: https://openspending.org there's a map of all countries with published datasets. This map is rendered with SVG which doesn't work in older browsers. OpenSpending users don't all use modern browsers so we need a fallback for the map (either a static image rendered in the background and grabbed via feature detection, or switching the map to a technology different than SVG). The open issue can be found at: https://github.com/openspending/openspending/issues/604

On OpenSpending's dataset index page: https://openspending.org/datasets/ countries are ordered by number of datasets that have been published.

Although this shows which countries are doing good this doesn't help users who are trying to find datasets in their country. The ordering should at least by default be alphabetical. For more information see the open issue: https://github.com/openspending/openspending/issues/659

OpenSpending labels all issues suitable for volunteers with Volunteer: Simple, Volunteer: Medium, and Volunteer: Hard. A good place to start would be to look at Volunteer: Simple or Volunteer: Medium issues and find one that interests you. OpenSpending collects them all on one page for a better overview: http://community.openspending.org/help/development/volunteer/

OpenSpending is split into different independent software/services. However there is a big coupling between OpenSpendingJS and OpenSpending core (the platform).

OpenSpendingJS can be used separately but it's also heavily tied into the OpenSpending platform. This reliance needs to be severed without breaking stuff and OpenSpendingJS needs to be restructured as a standalone library, usable all over the web.

It's just a big and complicated things, which needs a lot of testing and decisions around it.

OpenSpending was built using Pylons. Since then Pylons was deprecated and OpenSpending needs to migrate away from it to be simpler to hack on (where you can actually read good documentation of the web framework), security reasons, etc.

The obvious move would be to go for Pyramid but most developers seem to want to go for Flask.

This will require a lot of code rewriting of a pretty big code base. It's a big thing, but necessary for OpenSpending to live on as an open source project. The OpenSpending developers have made a lot of headway in moving to SQLAlchemy, Jinja2, and other independent functionality but there's more work to be done before a Flask version will be used (but hopefully the code base will be simpler to hack on as a result).