What's your idea?
Allow to bookmark/favorite issues without abusing the Assigned field or issue tags.
For contributors that are involved in a large amount of issues, the ones you want to keep track of quickly get pushed out of your lists by comments in other issues and it gets hard to keep track of ones that are more important to you or ones that you want to come back to in the near future.
A related issue for this is https://drupal.org/node/1621714
What are the benefits?
Contributor experience.
For people who are involved in a lot of issues it would make life much easier and potentially reduce the percentage of issues that get lost in the masses and never completed.
What are the risks?
It has been raised in the linked issue that it could make the interface more complicated/confusing for the more casual users who don't need such functionality, however I think that can be mitigated with thoughtful themeing or the ability to opt-in or opt-out of seeing the feature.
How can we measure the impact of this idea? (metrics)
It probably can't be measured.
Possibly it could be measured by the number of issues being resolved and how long they take to be resolved, but there are so many variables related to those metrics that it doesn't show a link with this partucular idea.
Who directly benefits from / will use this improvement? (target audiences)
Core and contrib contributors would get a better issue queue experience.
Users who submit issues could also benefit from this if it means that their issues are not forgotten (assuming that a contributor bookmarks/favourites their issue).
Are additional resources available for discovery/implementation? (volunteer effort, financial backing, etc.)
Nothing specific at this stage, however I would think that other contributors that like this idea would be happy to help in some ways where possible.
The target audience of this one is full of people with the expertise to make it happen.
Comments
Yes!
Right now, I Follow probably about 150 issues that are relevant in some way to what I do. My complete Follow list is about 15 pages long. I want to closely follow (and, let's be honest, care about significantly) less than 20 at any given time, although which 20 shifts regularly. Most people don't have the ability to add "Favorite of Dries" to an issue. :-) A difference between "follow to keep an eye on" and "follow because this is where my focus is" would be very helpful.
Throwing flag and bookmark at it is a really easy solution that would suit me fine.
Great idea!
Yes, I love this idea. Many times I want to retrace and old issue and cannot do it easily without making new search for the topic. Of course, you could use Google Chrome or other browser bookmarking capabilities to do that if you spent the time, but it would be nice to have it in the dashboard.
Browser bookmarks
Yeah, you could definitely do it is browser bookmarks but it is horrible and clunky and I think no where near as seamless and useful as it would be to have it as part of drupal.org.
Plus browser bookmarks can't show extra data, like how many (if any) new comments there are for your issues.