Rachel Nabors jumped into the deep end of the open source contributor pool and started making pull requests to fix issues. Of course in GitHub-land, it is not incumbent on the receiving end of the request to accept. Nabors didn’t have much luck. Seems like there are lots of prerequisites (check style guide, visit issue tracker, e-mail maintainers first) before you can realistically start firing fixes.
Part of the reason I’m becoming more interested in GitHub is that I’d someday like to be an open source contributor. But you’ve gotta know the tools. And clearly, as Nabors found out, the culture behind the commit log. Good to know.