Question: How do I get involved in contributing to these types of projects, I wish there were mentorship programs focused on helping software professionals get involved in open source/libre contributions. Any thoughts?
Truthfully, at this point anything goes. Browser, mail, instant messenger, bookmarks manager, a message [bus] that can be used to open a link on another (authorised) device, etc. etc.
Do you guys have any project that is more contribution-friendly to people not deeply invested in the development of GNU Net so far?
I found the best way to contribute to open source is to dive in. Contributing to the open source things you use by fixing issues affecting you is a common way to get involved. If the software you use doesn't have any downsides that affect you, usually they will have an issue tracker, sometimes with "newcomer" tags. In the worse case you can always find some spelling errors using codespell or similar, get those fixed and proceed from there to other static analysis tools and then to reviewing the code and fixing any issues you find.
But in general, just ask! Whenever someone posts a thoughtful comment, question or patch to one of my open source projects, I'm very appreciative.
Do you have a particular project you'd like to contribute to? If not, is there a particular area that's interesting to you?