There are two main ways to have a merge request flow with GitSwarm: working with protected branches in a single repository, or working with forks of an authoritative project.
With the protected branch flow everybody works within the same GitLab project.
The project maintainers get Master access and the regular developers get Developer access.
The maintainers mark the authoritative branches as 'Protected'.
The developers push feature branches to the project and create merge requests to have their feature branches reviewed and merged into one of the protected branches.
Only users with Master access can merge changes into a protected branch.
With the forking workflow the maintainers get Master access and the regular developers get Reporter access to the authoritative repository, which prohibits them from pushing any changes to it.
Developers create forks of the authoritative project and push their feature branches to their own forks.
To get their changes into master they need to create a merge request across forks.