Auto-assign new members and teams to tasks

✨ Making Collaboration Effortless: How STAPLE Handles Auto-Assignment

One of the biggest challenges in managing large, multi-team science projects is keeping everyone aligned when the team changes. New contributors join, new teams form, and tasks evolve constantly. In most systems, that means a lot of manual re-assignment. In STAPLE, we built an auto-assignment system that makes those updates seamless — and transparent.

🧩 The Problem

Before auto-assignment, adding a new person to a project meant someone had to:

• Manually assign them to every relevant task,

• Send notifications to keep everyone informed.

That process is tedious and error-prone — especially in collaborative science projects where tasks and contributors change frequently.

⚙️ The Idea

Instead of manually linking people and teams to tasks, each task in STAPLE can specify how future additions should be handled via a simple dropdown:

Auto-assign future additions:
  ▢ Do not auto-assign
  ▢ Auto-assign new contributors
  ▢ Auto-assign new teams
  ▢ Auto-assign new contributors & teams

💡 How It Works

When a new project member or team joins a project, we will:

1. Finds all tasks for that project where auto-assign matches the new addition.

2. Connects the new Contributor or Team to each of those tasks.

3. Sends a notification to that Contributor or Team Member.

🧭 Why It Matters

This feature creates huge time savings and reduces friction in collaborative workflows. It helps new contributors hit the ground running, keeps project managers out of busywork, and ensures data consistency across teams and tasks.