Mingla is an Slack bot used at SVT for (semi-)spontaneous video chats. We are a group of people that misses the spontaneous chats at the coffee machine, hallways, after meetings... we got inspired by bump-into-colleagues and articles like this article about weak tie friendships.
We have been using the bot since the middle of November 2020, and we have had several fun and interesting conversations.
The bot is executed four times a day. The first run will write a message to to a Slack channel we have chosen to call #mingla-med-kollegor. It contains some generic information, like the time slots when the mingle-events happen. Currently it's hard coded to 09:15, 12:00 and 14:50.
"Good morning! In 15 minutes the first mingle event will start! Click ☕ to take part in it. Choose 🥪 to take part in the 12:00 event, and 🍰 to take part in the 14:50 event."
We also ping everybody that's currently online (active) in the channel. We use three different reactions, :coffee:, :sandwich: and :cake: to select the events you'd like to take part in. In the screenshot I have selected the 12:00 and 09:15 events.
It looks like it was a lazy (or maybe busy) morning and I was the only one that was interested to chat at 9. At 09:15 when the bot did it's second execution for the day, it looked at the :coffee: reaction and noticed that where was to few people to create rooms, so nothing happend.
Yesterday the morning mingle was much more active. We had six people showing up (who had selected "coffee"). This created two different groups.
"Here are a few nice colleagues /../ select the group that you have been matched to. You are of course free to join any group if you were not selected. You have about 10 minutes to chat /.../"
We pick a few silly names for the groups matching real places at the office. We also suggest a few topics to kickstart the conversation.
The final two (lunch and afternoon) events have the exact same flow.
Python 3.6+, a Slack team and social people.
pip install git+https://github.com/svt/mingla.git@master
A sample configuration file is included here config.sample.yml, edit it and rename it to config.yml.
Just run mingla at 09:00, 09:15, 12:00 and 14:50!
We love contributions, see CONTRIBUTING for more information.
This software is licensed under the MIT license, for more information see LICENSE.