Slackbot messaging Proposal

[ExperimentsInHonesty]

Overview

What kind of repetitive thing do you have to do often and what is the benefit of automating it?
HackforLA needs to setup and send automated messages to our members via slack without having to pay monthly for a service like greet.bot.

Current State ("as-is")

We have one message that goes to all new members via greet.bot, all other communication is manual.

Future Development ("to-be")

We would like to be able to pull from csv file and markdown files:

e.g., When to send (days they have been a member), order, active(true/false), message file name
e.g.

• 1, 0, true, welcome.md
• 7, 0, true, joinedlastweek.md
• 30, 0, true, active30days.md
• 15, 0, false, notactive15days.md

when script finishes running it should report to whichever handles are in a csv file
e.g. @bonnie, @leader2, @Leader3, etc. as well as adding a successful or unsuccessful message to a log file in the repo.

Action Items

• Review the items in research

Research

https://github.com/CivicTechTO/slack-greeting-bot
Here is a tutorial for building our own slackbot: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-build-a-basic-slackbot-a-beginners-guide-6b40507db5c5/
https://api.slack.com/community
https://github.com/mishk0/slack-bot-api
https://medium.com/better-programming/make-a-team-roster-with-node-react-and-google-sheets-305b9f9ebbb1
https://api.slack.com/reference/surfaces/formatting

Stakeholders

Impact - who benefits and how?
Volunteers voices get heard on our surveys so we can improve the experience of onboarding

Anticipated outcomes

More survey compliance. We may only be hearing from people who join us, instead of all who go through the process.

Language

javascript or python prefered, so that it's easy to maintenance and improve based on our volunteer skill set.

Platform

Github repo and Github Actions

Automation triggers (What starts it? What's it responding to?)

• Time-based (Specify frequency (e.g. 1x/week)
• Event-based (e.g. someone just created a new GitHub on a repo)
  The script will run once a day. Messages will be sent based on how long someone is a member and each will have a different date trigger as specified by the csv file.

Input required (How much manual or custom input is required?)

Script will run automatically using Github Actions

Output

(What's the desired result? What do we not want to see?)
see Future Development

Project size

???

Resources

Slackbot Onboarding Flow (FigJam)

[tmshkr]

The Slack Block Kit Builder should be helpful for this. It encodes content into the URL as you make changes, so we can use that URL in a Markdown file to store content to be sent via Slack.

See the example in this repo:

https://github.com/tmshkr/vrms-content/blob/main/onboarding/0-welcome.md

[henlatourrette]

The Slack Block Kit Builder should be helpful for this. It encodes content into the URL as you make changes, so we can use that URL in a Markdown file to store content to be sent via Slack.

See the example in this repo:

https://github.com/tmshkr/vrms-content/blob/main/onboarding/0-welcome.md

Hey @tmshkr, thanks for your interest in moving forward with this project!

That Slack Block Kit Builder looks like a great tool.

I have a question regarding the URL you'd need to replace in order to update the message content: there's a place at the top right next to the "send to slack" button where it says "Hack For LA". How does it work? is it applicable to other Slack Workspaces?

Another question: would the "send to slack" button finalize the implementation of the slack bot or are there any other required steps involved?

[ExperimentsInHonesty]

@tmshkr we have sent you an invite from the 100Automations team, so that we can assign this issue to you.

[tmshkr]

@henlatourrette the "Send to Slack" button will send the block content to a channel or conversation in the selected workspace, to preview how it will look in Slack.

For archiving the block content, in order to send it with the app, we can use Markdown or put the content blocks in the source code, which will allow us to track changes with Git.

[henlatourrette]

@henlatourrette the "Send to Slack" button will send the block content to a channel or conversation in the selected workspace, to preview how it will look in Slack.

For archiving the block content, in order to send it with the app, we can use Markdown or put the content blocks in the source code, which will allow us to track changes with Git.

Hey @tmshkr , can you try to assign yourself to this issue again please? we've made some changes with the permissions.

[tmshkr]

@henlatourrette okay I was able to assign the issue to myself.