Since Github was founded in 2008, it has become the most popular social coding community on the
planet.
One of the social functions in GiHub is forking, forking a project, is
simply making your own copy of that project to be able to do changes.
Then, if you like to share these changes, you can notify the project owner with
a "pull request". After that, if your contribution was accepted, the owner can
merge it to the original repository.