I work for another project lately, including about 15 developers.  

We use GitLab as our source control server. 

What confused me is that we fork the original remote repo first, then clone the forked repo to local repo. 

When we want to push some code, we push code to our own remote repo, then make a merge request to the original remote repo. 

Why not just clone the remote repo to local repo directly?  

I think a feature branch can also work. What's the difference?  

Is there a standard?

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> 
> origin remote repo -> own remote repo -> local repo  
> 
>  origin remote repo -> local repo
> 
> 
>