D4D Slack Channel Viz

[geckya]

The D4D Slack is a a rich ecosystem, but it's a bit beastly to identify which of the nearly 200 channels one may want to join! A roadmap to help members know where to find the location/interest/language/package/project channels they want to follow would improve the onboarding experience, as well as help existing members keep up with what's new.

[wwymak]

is there metadata around slack channels that we can pull via the api? I know that I can probably do this via a slack bot integration but I'm not sure what the protocol is for these things in the d4d channel?

Also, would be fun to have a question and answer bot , e.g. ask new members what are your interests/languages/location etc and auto suggest channels...

[geckya]

We'll be working out of a folder/branch within the micro projects repo:
https://github.com/Data4Democracy/micro-projects/tree/master/d4d-slack-ecosystem

@wwymak - I pulled a json via the api tester using channels.list to get us started, and it's sitting in that repo linked above (I excluded archived channels and skipped the member list) - the channels.info method gives a little more info without going too overboard (timestamp of latest post in channel - maybe useful as an indication of whether a channel is active or not - and the text of the last post). channels.history gives more post history info. We could totally do an official bot integration with this, but we'll have to kick off an existing integration since we've maxed out our allotment for free Slack (this is totally doable, but we'll have to talk to a few more people to get a consensus decision first).

[bbrewington]

@geckya @wwymak Here’s a couple useful resources:

• Channel analytics (seems like it’s only available manually, no API) - https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/218407447-View-analytics-and-usage-
• Get info for each channel - https://api.slack.com/methods/channels.info