1) At the very least, read the projects About Us&#x2F;History page, and its Wikipedia article, to get a sense where it stands for in the grand scheme of things.<p>2) Do some searching to see what alternatives exist. Even typing &quot;alternative to Node.js&quot; will give you some starting points. E.g. when you find out about NW.js and want to use it, it would pay to know that there&#x27;s also Electron. If you learn there&#x27;s this hot Angular thing, it should pay to also check React and Ember.<p>3) Also check how &quot;alive&quot; the project is. Things like GitHub followers, latest commits, release frequency, etc, will give you a sense of that. You don&#x27;t have to go wild with this and (2) -- just check the 2-3 more prevalent projects in your niche. Again, if you don&#x27;t what those are, a search like (2) will help. Or ask Quora or even HN.<p>4) Check the published roadmap.<p>5) If you want to get even close to the project community, most have an aggregator blog, or an official project blog. E.g. &quot;Planet PHP&quot; etc. There&#x27;s also frequently mailing lists with links (e.g. Javascript Weekly). You can start reading whatever posts seem interesting to you -- soon you&#x27;ll have a sense of what the key players are, what developments are coming, etc.<p>6) Check the relevant Reddit channel for the framework&#x2F;project&#x2F;language, or HN for stories on it.<p>The first 4 items don&#x27;t take more than half a day to go through (of course you could spread them in a weekend or a whole week).<p>The (5) and (6) are more advanced, but still you can dip your toes slowly into them too -- a couple hours per week or so.<p>For more advanced involvement, you can go on irc and say hi to some devs and helpful volunteers. At later stages you can join their dev mailing lists, and even volunteer and help the project yourself.