There's actually lots of opportunity for this. It's way easier to get involved in open source now than it ever was. - GitHub, Google Code, Bitbucket, SourceFor

There's actually lots of opportunity for this. It's way easier to get involved in open source now than it ever was. - GitHub, Google Code, Bitbucket, SourceForge, CodePlex, ... - Google Summer of Code, Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Projects, OpenHatch, ... Getting involved in open source is easy, there's way too many projects that die or go unmaintained because there's no one to help. I have a few projects that could use contributors, but I assume you want to get involved in an active, serious, and popular open source project. Whatever project you're interested in, subscribe to their mailing list (won't hurt to introduce yourself), join their IRC channel, look at their open issues, grep the source for TODOs, look for something to improve, and submit your patch.