Working with Forks

With the fork & pull strategy, contributors create their own (remote) copy of the original repository and push changes to that copy, which is referred to as a fork. Once a contribution is ready, it can be submitted through a pull request: the contributor basically requests the maintainer(s) of the original repository to pull into that repository the work that has been prepared in a fork. Note that nothing prevents multiple contributors from working together in the same fork prior to submitting their changes to the original repository. 

The main advantage of the fork & pull strategy is that the contributors do not need to be explicitly granted push access rights to the original repository. That's why that strategy is typically used for large-scale open source projects where most contributors are not known by the maintainers of the repository. 

Another advantage of the fork & pull strategy is that it prevents the original repository from being polluted with branches that are created and then abandoned but never deleted by their author.