You could subscribe to the project's mailing list or join the IRC channel and answer any questions that newbies have. This is probably a softer introduction to

You could subscribe to the project's mailing list or join the IRC channel and answer any questions that newbies have. This is probably a softer introduction to contributing to an open source project than committing code. For example, I know the Django mailing list is pretty active and there are a lot of questions that can be answered.