Why not choose an open-source project that is well-known, and which has been historically open to accepting patches.
How do you know as someone who never participated in an open source project whether a particular open source project is historically open to accepting patches?
How do you know as someone who never participated in an open source project whether a particular open source project is historically open to accepting patches?
Here is a recent article with statistics on openness to accepting pull requests in various projects.
An article on ways to contribute if you’re not yet ready to contribute large amounts of OS code: Bug reports, bug fixes, documentation, etc.
At Ohloh, you can browse data on lots of projects and get a feel for how active each one is.
CodeHatch is designed specifically to get volunteers on-board OS projects.