Great free course on how to contribute to an open source project. Includes all of the small, integral steps that are key to the contribution process.

https://egghead.io/courses/how-to-contribute-to-an-open-source-project-on-github

Here are some important commands from 7th video in the course entitled, "How to fork and clone a GitHub Repository":

Add the original repo as Git remote so we can easily fetch and pull from it

Tell our local Git to go get information about the upstream remote

We want our local copy of master to point to upstream, so whenever we pull changes into master, it will get the latest changes from the upstream repository.