I don't have a "good" solution in mind but perhaps some partial solutions off the top of my head: Keep issues separate from the repos but allow tagging the rep

I don't have a "good" solution in mind but perhaps some partial solutions off the top of my head: Keep issues separate from the repos but allow tagging the repos in the ticket. Would allow multiple projects to get associated with one ticket. Community owned issues, a bit like stack overflow. GitHub projects are structured from the url to give the idea of total ownership by the the author of all the tabs of the project. So the issue tracker looks like it is "owned" by the author. Perhaps the author could choose to disown the tracker related to the project in some way. And then they could choose to own individual issues. Opt in instead of opt out and close.