GitHub 102 Tutorial Justin Longo, Assistant Professor & Cisco Systems Research Chair in Big Data and Open Government Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy University of Regina slides etc. available at Twitter:

 Copy a repo to your account  Contribute to other repos  Flag an issue  Issue a pull request  Manage a pull request  Create your GitHub.io webpage

To fork a repo, just go to the repo you’re interested in, and click the “Fork” button. For example, go to and click “Fork”

And a few seconds later, and the repo is now magically in your account: This is a full copy that you can edit as you want without affecting the original.

An issue can be like a comment on a file. If you want to try it out, go to test site: Click on the Issues Icon: On the next page, click on the green “New Issue” button.

To complete the issue flag, you would describe the issue (title, message) and then click on “Submit new issue”. The owner will review the issue and respond.

Issues can get very detailed. Here’s the start of a very fun issue comment thread with over 700 comments) related to the October 2013 U.S. government shutdown (you can find it at

To propose a change to someone else’s file, navigate to the page you want to change and click on the pen icon By editing directly through the GitHub.com interface, you are quickly borrowing a copy of the master. This is a simple way of proposing a change. No need to “Fork the Repo” to propose a simple change. You will see this notice:

Enter any changes you want to propose: When you’re done, scroll to the bottom of the page, label your change and describe it, and then click on “Propose file change”

On the next page you'll see this: You can review the changes you’ve proposed. The text at the bottom is called a “diff” display. Deleted stuff is in red, and added stuff is in green. If your happy with the proposed changes, click on “Create pull request”. On the next page, you have another chance to review the comments you’re sending to the file owner. When ready, click on “Create pull request” again. The owner of the file will receive your suggested changes.

If someone else sends you a pull request, you’ll receive a notification. Navigate to the open issue and review what was proposed. Once you’re satisfied with the pull request – and if it can be automatically merged – click the "Merge pull request" button, and click then "Confirm merge”. This button merges the pull request into the original, sends a notification to the person who initiated the pull request, and closes the pull request.

 First, you need to create a special repo in your account dedicated to only the Pages files.  On your profile page, in the top-right corner, select the + icon and click on “New repository” to get to this page: choose a “Repository name”. You must use the username/username.github.io naming scheme write a short description (“My GitHub webpage” works) mark the repo as “Public” mark the check-box “Initialize this repository with a README” “.gitignore” = None <-- Choose license <-- Click on “Create Repository”.

 Go to the main page for this dedicated repo you just created, and then click on “Settings” in the right- hand column.  Scroll down to “GitHub Pages” and click on the magical “Launch automatic Page Generator” button.  You’ll see a page like this: <-- Edit the page name and tagline <-- Edit the page body <-- Click on “Continue to layouts”.

 Pick your favorite layout and click on the green “Publish page” box to publish your page.  You’ll find your awesome page at  (It may take a few minutes to show up.)  Edit the file index.html to edit the home page (requires knowledge of html).

 Fork some more repos  Contribute to other repos  Flag an issue  Issue a pull request  Manage a pull request  Edit your GitHub webpage  Continue to explore GitHub

 GitHub Glossary (GitHub version): cyChallenge.github.io/blob/master/glossary.md cyChallenge.github.io/blob/master/glossary.md  This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No (VOSS: Managing Hybrid Challenge Platforms to Promote Innovation). Any opinion, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.VOSS: Managing Hybrid Challenge Platforms to Promote Innovation