Drupal 8 is the first development cycle introducing official Core initiatives. These are areas with named leads to improve Drupal core in certain areas. However, this does not limit core development to these main areas, there are many community initiatives as well, such as Drupal Media.Find out all the Drupal 8 Initiatives and get involved with your favorite one. Most of these Initiatives have a dedicated IRC channel and/or a group on gdo. To get started join the weekly meetings of the initiatives (More info on gdo group pages). Explain that you're taking part in GCI 2014 and start working on an issue belonging to that initiative, be it core or contrib. You need not completely fix the issue if it's a complex one, but try to spend sufficient time on it so that the mentor sees a meaningful progress on the issue.

Deliverables - Link to the issue(s) you worked on. Try to blog about your experiences with the Initiative.

Resources - - List of official Drupal 8 initiatives: https://www.drupal.org/node/2107085- Contrib Initiatives such as Drupal Media