I'm new to the social coding community and don't know how to proceed properly in this situation:

I've created a GitHub Repository a couple weeks ago. Someone forked the project and has made some small changes that have been on my to-do. I'm thrilled someone forked my project and took the time to add to it. I'd like to pull the changes into my own code, but have a couple of concerns.

1) I don't know how to pull in the changes via git from a forked repo. My understanding is that there is an easy way to merge the changes via a pull request, but it appears as though the forker has to issue that request?

2) Is it acceptable to pull in changes without a pull request? This relates to the first one. I'd put the code aside for a couple of weeks and come back to find that what I was going to work on next was done by someone else, and don't want to just copy their code without giving them credit in some way. Shouldn't there be a to pull the changes in even if they don't explicitly ask you to? What's the etiquette here

I may be over thinking this, but thanks for your input in advance. I'm pretty new to the hacker community, but I want to do what I can to contribute!