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A place to collect ideas for CfA health projects
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PhoneEmLater: a lightwight app for scheduling SMS/phone call reminders in govt #50

Open daguar opened 9 years ago

daguar commented 9 years ago

BLUF

A basic web app (+API) targeted at gov't users to make it easy to schedule text message or phone call reminders to clients

Basic user story

A gov't staffer wants to send a reminder to a client to submit paperwork a week from now. The staffer:

cc @lippytak, who sorta vaguely proposed premature optimization on a feature to this level and inadvertently excited me in the process

Mr0grog commented 9 years ago

Super surprised if there's not already something out there that can schedule an SMS.

Other quick thoughts:

BLUF

A basic web app (+API) targeted at gov't users to make it easy to schedule text message or phone call reminders to clients Basic user story

A gov't staffer wants to send a reminder to a client to submit paperwork a week from now. The staffer:

  • Opens the web app and logs in
  • Creates a new message with
    • Phone number to be texted
    • Body ("Hi! Don't forget to send in your paperwork by email! paperwork@myagency.gov")
    • A date/time for it to be sent in the future
    • The app takes care of the rest!

MVP features

  • Only text messages
  • Only a single user (HTTP basic auth)

Future features

  • Voice call messages can be sent to users
    • Text body for a robot to read, OR
    • URL for a voice file to be played (v3 feature: record audio for message in-browser, and it serves from the app)
    • Log view of all messages (outbound+inbound)
  • Can cancel messages in queue

Proposed technical architecture

  • Ruby (probably Rails)
  • Sidekiq (maybe using Rails 4.2's new ActiveJob feature) for job queuing
  • Twilio

cc @lippytak https://github.com/lippytak, who sorta vaguely proposed premature optimization on a feature to this level and inadvertently excited me in the process

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/codeforamerica/project-ideas/issues/50.

lippytak commented 9 years ago

'The story of Promptly: a brief reenactment of a 2013 fellowship tale by Dave and Rob'.

On Monday, December 22, 2014, Rob Brackett notifications@github.com wrote:

Super surprised if there's not already something out there that can schedule an SMS.

Other quick thoughts:

  • Cancellation is probably pretty important, even for MVP.
  • Likewise, seeing the queue so you can select one to cancel.
  • As a future feature, handling responses is probably a pretty big deal. For now, that means you probably want to log who scheduled a message so you know who to route responses to in the future. On Dec 22, 2014 11:54 PM, "Dave Guarino" <notifications@github.com javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','notifications@github.com');> wrote:

BLUF

A basic web app (+API) targeted at gov't users to make it easy to schedule text message or phone call reminders to clients Basic user story

A gov't staffer wants to send a reminder to a client to submit paperwork a week from now. The staffer:

  • Opens the web app and logs in
  • Creates a new message with
  • Phone number to be texted
  • Body ("Hi! Don't forget to send in your paperwork by email! paperwork@myagency.gov javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','paperwork@myagency.gov');")
  • A date/time for it to be sent in the future
  • The app takes care of the rest!

MVP features

  • Only text messages
  • Only a single user (HTTP basic auth)

Future features

  • Voice call messages can be sent to users
  • Text body for a robot to read, OR
  • URL for a voice file to be played (v3 feature: record audio for message in-browser, and it serves from the app)
  • Log view of all messages (outbound+inbound)
  • Can cancel messages in queue

Proposed technical architecture

  • Ruby (probably Rails)
  • Sidekiq (maybe using Rails 4.2's new ActiveJob feature) for job queuing
  • Twilio

cc @lippytak https://github.com/lippytak, who sorta vaguely proposed premature optimization on a feature to this level and inadvertently excited me in the process

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/codeforamerica/project-ideas/issues/50.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/codeforamerica/project-ideas/issues/50#issuecomment-67924761 .

Sent from thumbs

Mr0grog commented 9 years ago

Dangit can’t star comments in GitHub.

Mr0grog commented 9 years ago

@lippytak Speaking of which, what is the current state of Promptly? I remember when the SF team was working on it, but is it still maintained? Dead? (last commit was ~a year ago.) Was it even well used or did it turn out to be sort of a dud? (why?)

Mr0grog commented 9 years ago

Which further makes me think… every fellow comes out of this stuff with good advice, but it’s often tacit knowledge or only orally shared. @plusjeff’s recent blog post is great (http://www.codeforamerica.org/blog/2014/12/22/how-a-bumpy-ride-turned-into-a-golden-ticket/). Would be great to have a site that collects short post-fellowship/post-mortem writeups (not necessarily as long and detailed as Jeff’s) on every CfA project. Could be useful to so many people, but especially for future fellows and gov partners.

fureigh commented 9 years ago

@Mr0grog Definitely agree it could be useful. FWIW, I suspect content generation is the main challenge there. As far as having a site goes, conceivably they could all be on the Code for America blog, just tagged "fellowship reflections"/"post-mortem." But getting fellows to write up advice in a public forum is the bottleneck.

daguar commented 9 years ago

Definitely a good idea. This was sorta what I wanted WTFellow to be, but I experimented with a medium and it turned out not to work. I have a feeling more structured engagement along these lines (eg, project-specific post morta) would be a good approach.

On Dec 24, 2014, at 9:25 PM, Fureigh notifications@github.com wrote:

@Mr0grog Definitely agree it could be useful. FWIW, I suspect content generation is the main challenge there. As far as having a site goes, conceivably they could all be on the Code for America blog, just tagged "fellowship reflections"/"post-mortem." But getting fellows to write up advice in a public forum is the bottleneck.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.