Question

As the owner/coordinator of an open source project on GitHub, what is the common practice for committing changes yourself?

Is the following accurate:

1. Create an organization
2. Do the initial commit to the organization repo
3. Fork the organization repo into your personal repo
4. Commit to your personal repo
5. Issue a pull request from your personal repo to the organization repo

Answer 1

If you are the owner of the GitHub repo, you wouldn’t issue a pull request to your own GitHub repo because:

• you wouldn’t need to fork it on the GitHub side (the term “fork” refers to a GitHub clone of a GitHub repo)
• your expression “Fork the organization repo into your personal repo” means “clone the GitHub repo onto your local workstation”, where you can indeed “Commit to your personal repo”.
• if you have cloned it locally, its remote repo address is the GitHub repo you are the owner of, and you can directly push to it (no “pull request” required)

Other collaborators though, not owner of said organizational repo, would need to fork it, then to clone their fork (i.e. clone the GitHub copy onto their local workstation), and commit to their own repo before pushing to their GitHub copy.
If they want their changes to be reflected in the original organizational repo, then they would make a pull request to your initial GitHub repo.