Building the Rubberducky Slackbot. Part 1
HELPING PEOPLE FIND THE SKILLS AND TALENTS IN THEIR ORGANIZATION.
At a company-wide meeting at Pandera Labs, the topic came up that many of us were looking for better ways to connect with each other in the organization. We agreed that our company had a friendly and open culture, but many of us felt like bridges were missing. The designers and engineers felt like they were in different cliques, and Mike wasn’t sure what exactly everyone else here even did.
Brainstorming led us to all sorts of great team-building ideas. Company lunches. Happy hours. Daily link-ups. Game nights. In my opinion, those things definitely worked, but our designers’ comments still stuck with me.
On the engineering team I agreed that we are a clique in some ways, but I didn’t think it was intentional. The truth of the matter is that although we are all friends and we want to build connections with our colleagues, most of our interactions at work are about work, and as a result a clique had formed around our engineering work.
That got me thinking about how we could contribute to the work-conversation, even outside of our own departments. Rubberducky is a Slackbot I’ve started to help build those bridges.
With the Rubberducky Slackbot, you can find other people in your organization who would like a glimpse into or the opportunity to contribute to a problem you are solving. The idea here is pretty simple: Joe in accounting might be creating photorealistic oil paintings in his spare time, and he might be able to give valuable commentary and contributions to the design team. Rubberducky will be a conversational bot that helps people find unique, valuable, and previously hard-to-discover skills hidden within their colleagues.
There are more possible uses for a tool like Rubberducky, and I’m not 100% sure what exactly the bot’s full feature set or focus will be. For example, one of my coworkers mentioned that the bot could be a useful tool to find people who have worked on projects within your own department. Most engineering projects have difficult areas that people have worked on before, yet every developer that follows them might stumble in the same spot because they don’t know who to ask. I think that’s a great idea, (probably better than the original idea itself), and I’m excited to see how the bot grows organically.
This is the first in a series of posts to come about Rubberducky. Some will be technical, while others more focused on the more subjective process of discovering how Rubberducky might cultivate communication and help people contribute to Pandera Labs in the ways they are most valuable.
The next post in this series will be a more technical guide/walkthrough about how I got Rubberducky up and running for the first time. I’ll go over the technologies used, and some useful pointers about the parts of writing a bot I found confusing. Please subscribe to follow along.
