Slackbot meetup opportunity

[paolodamico]

Quick chat today with @timgl, and we were thinking that a cool way to incentivize meetups is creating a Slackbot that works like the Donut bot and creates a conversation between the matched teammates to start the conversation. We could even suggest some cool places for the most common cities.

If we do build the Slackbot, we could use it to detect location changes and suggest adding trips too. Thoughts?

@timgl maybe you're interested in building this ?

[paolodamico]

Spent some time thinking about this today. Some ideas.

MVP Scope

• Connecting Slack to your WITW account.
• When a Match is created, we open a conversation between the two matched users and the bot (same as the Donut bot, so we don't pollute the user's DMs).
  • We probably want to add a delay of maybe ~1 hour in case there are immediate changes to the trip (we would need to add a worker to the app if so).
  • The conversation includes details on who's traveling, matched city and overlap dates.
  • Users can click on button to open the match in WITW (we need a match page for this). From there, users can mark that they're meeting or dismiss the suggestion.
• We store the conversation ID in the Match record. If the Match is deleted (e.g. the underlying trip is removed), we send another message saying the trip has been cancelled.
• If you're matched to multiple users for the same trip, we create a single conversation with all matched users.

Implementation details / resources

• Slack app: https://api.slack.com/apps/A02UZ23H1GT/oauth
• Python SDK: https://github.com/slackapi/python-slack-sdk
• First off an Slack admin would need to approve the app and we store a bot token for the team: https://api.slack.com/authentication/basics#scopes
• Each user would then need to connect the app (https://api.slack.com/authentication/token-types#user) and we would store the user token and user ID for each user (the user ID is needed to create conversations).
• We can add a connect to Slack button in the /welcome page and maybe a toast CTA if you're an existing user.
• To start a group IM conversation: https://api.slack.com/methods/conversations.open
• To send a message in conversation: https://api.slack.com/messaging/sending#conversations

Post-MVP scope

• Reminders if no one has replied.
• Allow confirming/dismissing meetup straight from Slack.