Thank you so much for helping out with this library! Working with campaign finance data can be challenging and I think we're all better off when we view low-level details like parsing raw files into native data structures for commonly-used languages as a group effort.
I suspect GitHub is encouraging the creation of contribution guidelines due to popular repositories where the volume of contibution overwhelms the maintainers. Thankfully this library does not have that problem.
There really are no right and wrong ways to contribute. Creating a new issue here to ask a question is perfectly acceptable and could hopefully help future users who might have the same question. If the library doesn't behave as expected, hopefully the issue templates can help guide explaining how the actual behavior differed from the expected behavior. If you prefer, I'm happy to respond to questions and suggestions via email. If you happen to be a member of the News Nerdery Slack, I'm happy to chat about the library via direct message or about campaign finance data in general in the #campfin channel.