Can I set a github action to be triggered based on a watchlist of repositories releases or changes to a subset of their branches (defaulting to only master)?

For example if my (R package) repository is dependent on 3 other repositories I would want to have my workflow be triggered when those repositories have an event on the master or some defined subset of branches.

One way to achieve this would be to have a list of repositories in the workflow event field.

this would be an example of how the event could be defined:

event:
  observe:
    watch:
      - a
      - b: [master,dev]
      - c
    release: [a,b,c]

This would also get around a problem that “repository dispatch” has which you must have the right permissions to trigger that event.

With observe you would be passively triggering events instead of using an inefficient chron scheduling that can be used as a very blunt solution.

thanks!