OpenCoffee

Details

OpenCoffee was born as a project to support internal communication in a company with a high number of employees, which used Slack as its main messaging tool.

The need was not related to productivity in the strict sense, but to the creation of informal connection moments, encouraging meetings between colleagues who normally don’t collaborate on a day-to-day basis.
In structured and distributed corporate contexts, communication often tends to remain confined to individual operational teams, inevitably generating internal silos.

The context and needs

The client was looking for a solution to bring potentially distant people closer together, without introducing organizational complexity or invasive tools.

A fundamental requirement was also the conscious management of internal communications: many solutions already present on the market required Slack data access permissions considered excessive compared to the value offered.

The design approach

OpenCoffee was designed as an open source and self-hosted application, with particular attention to:

• Minimization of permissions required to operate as a Slack app
• Total transparency on necessary authorizations
• Complete control of infrastructure by the company

The goal was to offer a simple, verifiable and privacy-respecting solution, without giving up effectiveness.

Operation

From an operational point of view, OpenCoffee:

• Analyzes members of one or more configurable Slack channels
• Randomly associates people, or can be configured to maximize the distance between participants
• Proposes organizing a coffee break ☕ between colleagues
• Supports multi-language communications

The concept of distance is estimated empirically through an ad hoc metric, which builds a “remoteness” matrix by evaluating the least overlap of presence in public channels.
This approach encourages meetings between people who rarely interact.

A project designed to be adopted

Although there are various open-source scripts that perform similar tasks, the project aims to provide a package as ready-to-use as possible and with detailed step-by-step documentation, for setting up everything, from configuring the bot on the Slack side, to the Python script assembly part, with related execution.

OpenCoffee is an Open source project; the complete code is available on GitHub under MIT license.