@heartsucker has expressed willingness to help with workflow improvements such as assigning sources to journalists via the Journalist Interface, or managing inboxes for multiple news organizations in a single SecureDrop instance (may be appropriate for organizations which share one legal parent).
Specifically vis-a-vis the assignment feature, there’s a lot of new discussion here. We did previously have a never-released implementation of this idea, which was backed out at the time due to lack of support for database migrations (a longstanding problem that was finally fixed with SecureDrop 0.8.0, thanks to @heartsucker, @redshiftzero and other reviewers!).
The idea of a lightweight assignment workflow is backed by user research: news organizations currently use spreadsheets and similar external tools to track who is responsible for a given SecureDrop submission.
Because this is a common cause of confusion, it’s worth noting that “the people who check SecureDrop” vs. “the journalists who write stories based on SecureDrop” are often two distinct groups; this feature would only help the former group. So when we say “assigning to journalists”, we mean “assigning to journalists who are on-boarded to SecureDrop”, which is very often only a small subset of relevant people in a given organizational context.
I proposed some possible next steps here and would appreciate thoughts from the UX team, both here and in the issue. I’ve also added this topic to the agenda for the next UX meeting on Monday at 17:30 UTC.