Cloning allows you to take open source resources and modify them for your own uses. GitHub enables more than cloning. You can suggest changes by requesting that another user pull your changes. You can respond to issues reported by project managers. You can follow the progress of projects similar to yours to observe workflow and evolving solutions.
Once you are comfortable making changes to your own files and pushing them from your local directory to your GitHub repository, you can explore cloning someone else's repository. When you wish to contribute to the repository in question, you can issue a pull request. This request asks the master branch to consider pulling the changes and merging them with the master version. When people are working in a modular way, these changes can run without much conflict.
For more information, please check out this pull request tutorial
Pull requests may also be submitted in the GUI on GitHub.com.
Issues are GitHub's collaborative bug trackers. Any time something seems broken on a project, users can issue reports to keep track of spots that need attention.
I recommend GitHub's Guide to Issues.
Watching other projects will help you get a handle on how people use git and GitHub to great effect. Reading commit messages, seeing issue reports, and witnessing merges gives you a stronger sense of how projects get put together.
I recommend following active projects like:
DH Box a digital humanities laboratory in the cloud. It's a web application built using Docker, which enables containerized virtual environments so you don't have to worry about dismantling your own system. For those interested in text analysis, @DH_Box will soon launch a corpus downloader to access texts from the British Library in conjunction with Jonathan Reeve's Git-Lit project.
Manifold Scholarship is jointly based out of the GC Digital Scholarship Lab and University of Minnesota Press. Manifold is a Mellon-funded open source hybrid publishing platform led by GCDI instigator Matthew K. Gold and Doug Armato at UMNP in collaboration with Cast Iron Coding.
You can also follow the GC Digital Fellows for new workshops.
Linguists may be interested in digital fellow Ian Phillips's The Linguists' Kitchen.
Glossary ~ ~ ~ Helpful commands