Jacaranda [Deprecated because this Right To Know version has been incorporated into the original version]
A watchful tree and slack messenger to keep you informed of the use of Right To Know.
Jacaranda is an experiment to see the impact of regular feedback on the people developing and contributing to Right To Know. It aims to keep you more informed of the use and impact of Right To Know; to remind you of the effort you’ve put in to achieve this; and to do this in an quick and unobtrusive way.
Jacaranda collects information about what’s happening on Right To Know and the work contributors do to make it better for them. It then sends a short fortnightly message to our Slack channel to give us a sense of how things are going.
This is a very basic start. We’ve interested to see how getting these messages impacts us and what we do with the information.
Currently Jacaranda tells you about:
- The number of new requests in the last fortnight
- The number of annotations in the last fortnight
- The number of requests that were successful in the last fortnight
Feel free to change the text or the information in presents to what you think will have a better impact.
Usage
This program depends on three environment variables:
- Slack channel webhook url to post the message to
- Live mode to make it actually post to the Slack channel #townsquare and save to the database
In local development you can add these to a .env file
and use dotenv to load them as the scraper runs:
MORPH_SLACK_CHANNEL_WEBHOOK_URL="https://hooks.slack.com/services/XXXXXXXXXXXXX"
MORPH_LIVE_MODE=falseCreate a .env file using the example provided by running cp .env.example .env.
Running this on morph.io
You can also run this as a scraper on Morph. To get started see the documentation
Image credit
The Jacaranda Slack avatar is cropped from a photograph of the Jacaranda trees on Gowrie St, Newtown, Sydney by Flickr user murry. Thanks murry for making it available under a creative commons license.