At the Southern California Linux Expo last week, I learned about a non-profit called CodeDay that provides “welcoming, hands-on opportunities for under-served students to explore a future in tech”.
One of their projects is CodeDay Labs, which puts together a mentor, a team of students, and sets them to work on an issue on an open-source project.
I think this is a great opportunity for open source projects to engage students and help get them interested in free/open software, and for experienced developers to start mentoring.
Here is their page on how OSS maintainers can get involved.
Something I thought was especially clever about how these opportunities are put together is that CodeDay doesn’t have people mentor the contributions to their own projects, because the mentoring is really about teaching the students the skills and approaches to solve problems on real-world projects as compared to how most learning is structured.