Is it in principle possible to use Jira to coordinate group work in an NGO?

Question

Hello, I work as a volunteer for an NGO where a relatively large number of people (dozens) translate topical commentaries to various target languages.  All of them are volunteers, so a typical pattern of work would be to create an issue to translate particular text to particular target language, assign it to a group (or rather make it accessible to a group of volunteers for the given language) and then manage some workflow milestones of each of such tasks, such as "translated", "reviewed" etc. 
It seems JIRA fits this work pattern very well.  Have you met someone who already used it in a non-IT NGO activity, or, also are there any reasons why it should not be possible to use it this way?

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

I've worked with lots of organisations (including, but not limited to, NGOs) that use Jira for non-IT purposes.  Heck, one of them plans weddings with it and another does building resource control, if you want completely non-IT examples.

I even know one place that has does translations as you're planning.  They are translating for international software they write, but the translations teams just translate text given to them in Jira (literally, read the English Description field and fill in another field in the target language) and Bamboo goes off to build the language packs when they'd done a full set.

It sounds like it could be a very good fit for you.

You do mention one little thing though - Jira does not assign to groups, and it does that very deliberately, because group assignee invariably leads to "I thought someone else was doing it".  I tend to leave an issue unassigned but with a field that has the group named (a group picker possibly, but a select list is usually better.  Or possibly components if you want to maybe represent each language as a component and allow users to select multiple ones on a request)

There's lots more we could talk about when you get into setting up such a system, but the short answer to your question is "Yes, and it's a good fit"