slack-statsbot

This is a Slack bot that monitors and reports on who is speaking in channels. It is an experiment by users of the LGBTQ in Technology Slack. But why?

It is beta-quality as we work out what we need. For now, it monitors any channel it’s a member of and reports on who has been speaking by whether or not they are men or people of colour.

To tell the bot you are a man, you send a direct message saying I am a man, or I’m not a man, it’s complicated whether I am a man and other such variations otherwise. You can say I am a person of colour or I am white. You can check what information has been recorded by saying info. This interface is brittle but functional for now.

It’s not my tendency to categorise the world as men vs. not-men, but in the case of space-domination, it seems like the necessary dichotomy.

How does it work?

The bot observes messages in channels it’s invited to. On every hour (configurable with REPORTING_INTERVAL), it posts a brief report in each channel it has monitored, as long as a minimum REPORTING_THRESHOLD of messages has been reached, 10 by default.

It also reports the detailed statistics for each channel in the STATS_CHANNEL, which is #statsbot by default.

If TOP_UNKNOWNS_TO_QUERY is set to greater than 0 (it defaults to 2), the bot will message the two most talkative users who have not self-identified and have not yet been queried to ask them to self-identify.

Hey, I’m a bot that collects statistics on who is taking up space in the channels I’m in. For now, I only track whether or not a participant is a man and/or a person of colour. You can let me know “I’m not a man”, “I am a person of colour”, “it’s complicated whether I am white” and other such variations, or ask for my current information on you with “info”. View my source at https://github.com/backspace/slack-statsbot If you don’t want to answer that’s okay, I won’t ask again.

Admins on the Slack can configure the bot to skip reporting on particular attributes on a per-channel basis. For example:

Admin: ignore manness in #men

Bot: Okay, I will no longer report on manness in #men.

Admin: options for #men

Bot: #men reports ignore: manness

Admin: unignore manness in #men

Bot: I will again report on manness in #men.

But why?

From Seven Studies That Prove Mansplaining Exists:

1. Women get interrupted more than men.
2. Men interrupt women to assert power.
3. Men dominate conversations during professional meetings.
4. Men and boys dominate conversation in classrooms.
5. Patients are more likely to interrupt female doctors than male doctors.
6. Men get more space in print and online journalism.
7. On Twitter, men are retweeted more often than women.

Here’s an explanation from a Slack participant who is a man:

I think the way to think about the bot is that it's a gentle reminder that […] men are speaking more in the larger group spaces. We should look at it both as an encouragement for not-men to speak up ("Your voices are wanted and respected here"), and for men to engage in conversation with not-men (as in - make sure you don't run rough-shod over conversation points brought up by not-men, which is shockingly easy to do).

I am a man myself, and recognise my own complicity in these patterns even as I work to fight them. I try to have the humility to listen when someone wants to bring something up with me, so please do. Men who are angry or upset about this should direct their inquiries to me and other men on the Slack, not others, who can choose to participate or not.

Known limitations

• if the bot restarts, all gathered statistics are lost
• there’s no way to check on the current status; the bot will report after an hour has elapsed, and that’s it
• the report begins with a relative time that the statistics began accumulating, which for a channel that has its first message since the gathering began is the time the message comes in, meaning when the report is shared it will appear to represent less than an hour
• there’s no error handling!
• there are no automated tests for some functionality, such as:
  • the triggering of the hourly report
  • not printing a report when a channel has not had any messages
  • the message count logger
  • the UserRepository, a wrapper around Sequelize
• software can only do so much to undermine patriarchy and white supremacy
• some people are annoyed by the appearance of new messages in a channel only to find it’s the bot’s report, but Slack doesn’t (yet?) provide a way to send silent messages or the like

Requirements

This uses ES2015 features and runs on (at least) Node 4.2.0.

The bot is for Slack, so you’ll need to set up a bot integration and have an API token ready. The user information is stored in a Postgres database.

The terse, in-channel reports use emoji for a concise, sparkline-like experience. Add the images at img/sb-*.png as emoji manually or with one of the many brittle-seeming tools.

Running

You can run the bot thusly:

DATABASE_URL=postgres://localhost/databasename \
SLACK_TOKEN=your_token \
npm start

Testing

You should be able to run the tests thusly:

npm test

If that doesn’t work, this might:

for I in test/*.js; do $I; done

Deployment

If you have a Heroku account, you can deploy the statsbot with minimal effort with the above button. You’ll need your Slack token, but everything else has sufficient defaults. With Heroku’s new pricing structure, if you like the bot, you may need to move to a Hobby dyno to prevent it from being shut down.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my mom for raising me with feminist values, even if they weren’t called that. Many friends and writers have helped me learn more about anti-oppression or social justice or whatever you like to call it.

The people in the Slack have been supportive as I worked on this, particularly @aredridel and @iarna. Thanks to @seldo for setting it up. Thanks to @joxn for the original sparkline emoji.