JBoss GSoC 2016 ideas page[1] lists all the participating projects and their corresponding ideas/proposals. Important information(mailing list, IRC channel, project site/ source/ jIRA/ documentation/wiki etc.) for each participating project is also listed on ideas Page.

Students interested to work on any proposal(s) should subscribe to the corresponding project mailing lists and go through its documentation/ wiki/ source code base. The ideas may be research based and may require student to think about Proof of Concept before design/implementation. Also, they can contact assigned mentors on respective IRC channel/mailing-list keeping in mind IRC/mailing-list etiquette's. It will be in best interests of students to have a good feel about the idea/feature/project-documentation in general before getting in touch with respective community.

Potential students must also prefer forking the respective source code and look into the respective project's JIRA for small/minor to medium level bugs and try to fix them. They can also have an overview of the respective source code and its modules. Its better in case you have a look and feel of the source. It is advisable to contact assigned mentor/channel/mailing list of respective project before student(s) start working upon any feature/bug or enhancement.

Extreme beginners must learn git (basics, forced push, rebased pull, interactive rebase, squash, branch etc.) preferably on any linux flavor, if not already. :)