No, I meant more in terms of people seeing each commit/comment as it's made, looking at the code, understanding the steps and choices taken along the way, etc. My concern is that if a huge patch comes through at some point in the future, representing years of work, it'll be too big for any reviewer to get their head around and fully understand, and if there are problems (of course I have no idea about this, just speaking from experience on other projects) then a huge pile of "this needs fixing" notes can stall the patch indefinitely, whereas collaboration/visibility along the way can help head those things off early, before they seem overwhelming.

I guess what I mean by visibility is... if I wanted to see the code kareila's working on right now, and offer comments/tweaks to it, would I be able? Is her branch publicly available, and are commits to it as visible as commits to the trunk would be? Or is it off to the side somewhere where people can't see it or aren't aware of it?