Merge requests are a place to propose changes you've made to a project and discuss those changes with others
Interested parties can even contribute by pushing commits if they want to.
gitlab.fachschaften.org now offers a self-hosted Renovate Bot. You can invite the Bot to your project as a Developer or higher to have automated dependency updates, more info in the Renovate Docs.
Interested parties can even contribute by pushing commits if they want to.