It is intended to make the patch management process easier for both the project's contributors and maintainers.

The project's maintainer can then scan through the list of patches, marking each with a certain state, such as Accepted, Rejected or Under Review.

Currently, Patchwork is being used for a number of open-source projects, mostly subsystems of the Linux kernel and FFmpeg.

Although Patchwork has been developed with the kernel workflow in mind, the aim is to be flexible enough to suit the majority of community projects.

Patchwork was developed by Jeremy Kerr for use with the Linux PPC64 mailing list.