For the World
1) Think about a project that you would love to work for.
2) Now search a FOSS equivalent of that project on privatelee.com or google
3) Read the contribution & coding guidelines, setup your IDE/Editor accordingly
4) Fork the project and start contributing, connect to the core developers through their prefferd medium. IRC/Mailing-Lists/Forums or plain Email.
5) Credits & Honor.
For a Company
1) Ask yourself what you want to change in the world, if you had power & money. Think about it seriously and flabbergast yourself, by finding out what you really wanted to do all your life.
2) Hunt companies actually doing that on privatelee.com or google
3) This will be the first time you can be really honest about why you want to work for this company. Keep that in mind when you're writing your job application. Send it by Email and add tracking to it, so you can see, if and how companies read your CV etc.
4) Wait for a response for 4 days and remind the person, cc another responsible person. You can hunt anyone's email address easily online.
5) Be yourself in your job interview. Easy. You always wanted to do that and it's your dream. Everybody wants YOU in their company. For me it wouldn't matter if such a candidate had failed school or not, when he had the skills and intrinsic motivation to help the company go forward.
6) $$$