I'm on a private project that eventually will become open source. We have a few team members, talented enough with the technologies to build apps, but not dedicated developers who can write clean/beautiful and most importantly long-term maintainable code.

I've set out to refactor the code base, but it's a bit unwieldy as someone in the team out in another country I'm not in regular contact with could be updating this totally separate thing.

I know one solution is to communicate rapidly or adopt better PM practices, but we're just not that big yet. I just want to clean up the code and merge nicely into what he has updated. Would a branch be a suitable plan? A best-effort-merge? Something else?