People on a Task

People on a task — "Involved"

Some jobs are not one person's. Three of you are rebuilding a server, or one person is doing the work and another is checking it. Until now a task had exactly one assignee, so the only way to show that was to write the other names in the description, where nothing could act on them.

A task now has one owner, who is accountable for it, and anybody else working on it is listed as Involved.

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Adding somebody

Open a task. Under Assignee there is an Involved section: a row of names, and a picker reading Add someone.

• Pick a name and they are on the task immediately. There is no save button.
• Click the × on a name to take them off.
• The picker only offers people who can actually be added: it leaves out the owner, anybody already on the task, and — if you run more than one company — analysts who cannot reach the company this task belongs to.

Adding somebody needs no special permission. It is everyday work, like putting a tag on a task. Nobody has to be an administrator to say who is helping.

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What it changes for them

The task appears in their My Tasks as well as the owner's — and it is marked, so they can still tell at a glance what is theirs to answer for and what they are only helping with:

TICKET rebuild          JS   ▪ Involved

Their initials sit beside the owner's on the board card, drawn as an outline rather than a filled circle so the person accountable still reads first.

Pointing the analyst filter at somebody else asks the same question about them: what are they on, whether they own it or not.

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One owner, not several equals

This is the one place the feature deliberately does not do what was first asked for, so it is worth being straight about why.

A flat set of equal assignees means nobody in particular is accountable, and in practice that reads as somebody will pick it up. Keeping one owner also means the assignee field still means exactly what it always meant, so every existing automation, report and board grouping carried on working unchanged.

A task can still have nobody as owner while people are involved. That counts as unassigned — it has helpers but nobody answerable — and it deliberately still shows up in "unassigned" lists, because that is precisely the situation those lists exist to catch.

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Being told what happens

Being on a task is only useful if you hear what happens to it. Under Preferences → Notifications there is a switch for each moment on its own:

Switch	On by default?
A task is assigned to me	Yes
I am added to a task	Yes
I am taken off a task	No
Someone comments on a task I am on	Yes
Someone changes the status of a task I am on	Yes
Someone changes the due date of a task I am on	No
A task I am on is completed	No

Comments and status changes start on, because somebody else moving a task is news you cannot get any other way. Due dates start off, since they are moved during planning far more often than the rest and usually several at a time.

Two rules sit underneath all of them:

• Nothing ever tells you about your own actions. A task you are working alone stays completely silent.
• Events about the task go to everyone on it; events about your own place on it go to you alone. Sending "a task was assigned to me" to four other people would be both noisy and untrue.

Commenting, moving the status and changing the due date are also workflow triggers, so they can drive automations, not only notifications.

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Optional: each person ticks off their own part

Off by default. Switch it on at Tasks → Settings → Involved, and everybody listed on a task gets a tick of their own, so you can see who has finished and who has not. A finished name is struck through.

The ticks are progress, never a gate. The owner still closes the task whether or not everybody has ticked; closing with people outstanding gives a warning you can dismiss. Making completion conditional on the ticks would mean one person leaving makes a task permanently uncloseable, and would hand everybody on it a veto — which is co-ownership again, the thing one-owner exists to avoid.

Switching the setting off hides the ticks. It never deletes them, so switching it back on shows what was already recorded.

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Subtasks

Deliberately not included. A subtask already takes an assignee of its own, and that is how you say these four are each doing a piece: give each piece its own subtask. Allowing both would be two overlapping ways of saying the same thing with no rule for which wins.

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For the API

assigned_analyst still returns one person, unchanged. Beside it there is now a collaborators list, and two new filters on the tasks endpoint:

Filter	Means
involved_analyst_id=42	tasks 42 owns or is involved in — what My Tasks means
collaborator_id=42	tasks 42 is involved in but does not own

unassigned=true still means nobody is accountable, even when people are helping.

See REST API — Tasks.

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Setting up

Nothing to configure. An installation upgrading to it needs one run of System → Database Verification to create the table.

Requested in discussion #89.

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Developers: see People on a task — Developer Guide.