I don't think the Hamming advice is so great. It's akin to asking, "What are the highest salary professions? Why aren't you entering them?".

Academia is a market-place. Everyone wants high research impact, for a given expenditure of time. Some opportunities are higher-value than others, but as those opportunities appear, other researchers are going to identify them too.

So in academia, as in the economy, it's better to identify your comparative advantage --- both short-term, and long-term. You usually need to publish something quickly, so you need to know what you can do right away. But you also want to plan for the medium and long-term, too. It's a difficult trade-off.

I've heard a quote from Richard Hamming "What are the important Problems in your field? And why aren't you working on them?"

Did the most important achievements that happened in academia in any field 30 years ago came from the problems considered most important at that time?

I was shocked and started wondering why I wasn't working on anything like that? Then I wondered: Why wasn't EVERYONE working on something like that?

If you don't understand why, I think it's worth your time to figure it out. Do you understand why everyone working on the most important problem is a bad idea?

The first computer to visit my home was there in 1972. The first to stay, 1977. Was doing simple hardware and software work in the 1980s. Began using open source software in 1991. On the internet since 1992. Nothing holds me back in using computers worse than inadequate documentation.

I contributed better documentation in the past. The field changed and my past work helps no one now. I struggle to keep up, as all do, but now I know if I help with documentation (a) it is fleeting, which is acceptable if discouraging, and (b) the noise to signal ratio in online documentation is too loud to compete with. I will help myself and help people in person but I see no way to help over all.

There was a time when a man could read every printed book on the planet. There weren't many. That stopped being possible long ago. Knowing all there is to know to make a computer and put software on it, that is done but not much. And I'd say no one anywhere knows what it takes to make all the hardware and software for a simple smart phone. The whole field shuts out the individual now. It is no fun any more.

The quote hits close: I like open source, yet at work I am "hacking" an closed-source ERP/order processing/accounting/manufacturing etc. software.

The reason is valuing a stable reliable income over job satisfaction. As long as my customers, employers want to use this, instead of open-source competitors I am OK with it.

Why do customers want to use this ERP not the open source ones?

• ERP has intrictate features not obvious to users yet crucially important. Consider your FIFO inventory valuation. Suppose you buy something with a purchase invoice, build it as a component into another product, move it to another warehouse, sell it, and then return from the customer as it was a mistake during invoice posting, so it comes back to inventory. And at this point you book another purchase invoice, a shipping / delivery cost for the original purchase which increases the cost / inventory value of your original purchase, and that cost should go through the whole chain eventually increasing the value of the finished product you just returned from the customer! This is the only way it is legal (in the EU at least) and it is HARD! Because there are software with a wide user base for 20-25 years and they still don't get it right, have bugs in thus process and bugs here are fully UNACCEPTABLE because it means not something minor like your software crashing. It means something major like the earnings you put into your P/L (income statement) are completely wrong (as COGS is a big part of it) and the taxes you pay are wrong and you get fined and the CEO goes into prison.

• Customers have no way of verifying this at a sales demo

• They go for big establishes brand names, SAP Oracle Microsoft etc. They hope a hundred thousand companies cannot all have their earnings, P/L, income statement ,COGS, hence inventory valuation wrong so hopefully the big software houses do it right, and not buggy. Well, this is half true.

• They are kind of right. I investigated back then two open source ERP, Compiere in 2004 and TinyERP turned OpenERP turned odoo.com in 2009 and they did not even TRY this process. There was no FIFO cost forwarding whatsoever! It was like you put in the purchase price of an item as a master data and job done. UGH.

• The majors are still buggy in corner cases, at least as I can see from the feedback of others, and hands-on with the one I am working with

• These are not acceptable bugs like OK Firefox is something crashing, so what. They are "NASA bugs", things that Must Not Be.

Here's something that has some aspects of what you're asking for, though it doesn't do exactly what you want: http://www.codetriage.com/

In case it helps, here's a rough list of the thoughts that have come to mind:

• Simplicity is usually best with voting systems. It may be worth looking at a reddit style up/down system for popularity. With importance you probably want high/mid/low. If you track the 'importance profile' of a user, you could use that to promote projects to their attention that other users with similar profiles find important. Also, in all these rankings it should be clear to the user exactly what metric is being used.

• Make use of the wisdom of crowds by getting users to evaluate projects/tasks/comments for things like difficulty, relevance, utility, marginal utility - along the lines of this xkcd comic.

• It seems to me that good open source management tool should direct attention to the right places. Having inbuilt problem flags that users can activate to have the problem brought to the attention of someone who can solve it seems like a good idea.

• Skill matching. Have detailed skill profiles for users and have required skills flagged up for tasks.

• Could try breaking projects up into a set of tasks, sub-tasks and next actions a-la Getting Things Done

• Duolingo provides free language courses. They plan to make this financially viable by crowd sourcing translations from their students. Perhaps a similar thing could be implemented - maybe by getting university students involved.

• Gamification across a broad range of possible tasks. Give points for things like participation, research, providing information. While rewarding programmers for coding is good, we should seek to reward anything that lowers the activation energy of a task for someone else.

• Keep a portfolio of work that each user has completed in a format that is easy for them to access, customize and print out and reference in job applications.

• Encourage networking between users with similar skills, areas of interest and the like. This would provide a benefit to being part of the community.

• You could have a Patreon like pledging system where people pledge a small amount to projects they consider important. When the project reaches a milestone the contributors then get rewarded a portion of the pledge.

Have you read The Cathedral and The Bazaar?

So, basically a review site for OSS?

I think the reason something like this doesn't already exist are the barriers to entry. I've often toyed with the idea of contributing to several large linux distributions, like Ubuntu. But the barriers to entry for this are immense. Often you have to deal with obscure version control systems, archaic build tools, and strange development environments before you can even get to the actual process of contributing to the projects. In my experience, the more important a software project is, the harder it is to contribute. Contributing some extra CSS on a webui project on github is often very easy, whereas fixing a bug in a c library that is on a bzr version control system using a modified 1998 version of gnu autotools to make itself is hard.

If these barriers to entry were lower, it would be easier to contribute.

I can offer one data point. A lot of people consider P vs. NP to be the 'most important problem' in CS. I personally don't think it's a very interesting problem. I don't think any solution to it would necessarily reveal any major new insights. And I think it's far beyond my abilities to work on.