I know there have been numerous posts about this, but I just wanted to add my name to the list. This really is a problem as I often need to direct a task to more than one person.

Our opinion on multiple people responsible for anything:
http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives2/make_one_person_responsible.php

We believe the way to get something done is to make one person responsible. One person is always more responsible. Assigning a single point of responsibility translates to accountability which translates to effort to get that thing done.

Isn’t that based on the assumption that these people are all working in the same company?

Take for example a recent task for a project where every company involved needs to write a progress report. For just a few companies you could create a task/todo for every company, but as the involvement grows the manual work gets tedious. These are actually quite common setups and have nothing to do with making one person responsible.

Jeroen, in that case you actually do need individual items as you can otherwise not track when someone checks something off. If you don’t, the first company to check it off will have it checked off for everyone.

Perhaps you can use todo list templates for some of these things if you have many similar tasks. Then it’s easy to clone for each company involved.

Quixotic though it may be, I’ll go on record as saying I think BaseCamp is wrong about this. I read the linked rationale, and I think your lecture on assigning responsibility is misplaced. Quite often we have tasks that multiple people are responsible for, for example, looking over a draft on a writeboard and leaving comments. I would like to be able to write that one to-do and assign it to the relevant people rather than having to write eight to-dos. It pretty much comes up every single day and is annoying each time. (And it has nothing to do with diluting responsibility for tasks.)

andyatcl, if you have to tell 8 people about something the best method is to post a message and use the email notifications to let them know. A to-do could be checked off by one person and then the other 7 won’t know it needs to be done. That defeats the purpose of a to-do.

Jason, thanks for your response. I think I didn’t express myself clearly enough. The functionality that I would like to see is an option on the Todo assignment menu that would let me assign a task to something like “Team A” and then a specific Todo would show up in the individual lists of Bob, Bill, Julie and Sam, the people I would have configured as Team A. When one of them checks their box, only their box gets checked. The others still have to complete the task. The notion of the individual todo isn’t violated—I’m just looking to bundle several people’s todos together as a convenience.

We do a lot of collaborative tasks, like all commenting on a working draft, and this would be helpful for making sure we’ve gotten everyone’s input.

I know that I can post a message but we really like the way the todos offer a clear at-a-glance view of everyone’s tasks. Messaging, isn’t as reliable among us. Thanks.

andyactl,

Nice idea but the current state of Basecamp would complicate matters. Ticking off an item as done doesn’t allow you to add a comment, so you can’t really say how you completed the task or add in any useful notation.

As Basecamp stands I think one task per person makes sense. Once things like to-dos are linked to messages and there are closing comments, I think then assigning a task to more than one person would start to make sense.