A bot to help manage the org

[mikeal]

Wanted to get this on everyone's radar.

https://github.com/mafintosh/nodeschoolbot

Over at NodeSchool they built a robot to workaround some of the access control issues in GitHub. It's good to keep this in mind when we find challenges in the workflow like tagging issues where GH write access is a bit of barrier.

[Fishrock123]

Been thinking about this for some time. I quite like it.

[DavidTPate]

Pretty cool idea. My first thought was Hubot, but I could totally do something similar for managing my orgs with GitHub Webhooks + AWS Lambda. Thanks.

[williamkapke]

@mikeal Yeah- I can definitely see how this would solve a bunch of organizational work. LMK if/how I can help make this happen.

Suggestion: change the title of this to something like "A bot to help manage the org"

[nebrius]

+1 on the title change. I saw the latest notification and thought "now what about the NodeSchool NodeBot workshop"? 😁

[williamkapke]

@mikeal I've been playing around with this. I'm not sure if anyone else has a work-in-progress or not.

It works.. but it isn't the greatest bot.

• When you post something, Github doesn't update the reply consistently. So you need to refresh the page.
• If anyone is watching the repo, there is a lot of spam.
• I tried out messages that self-destruct; meaning they delete after 10 seconds. This helped to keep things a bit more clean, but if Github doesn't update the thread- you miss the bot's reply.

See: https://github.com/no-duh/playground/issues/1

[mikeal]

This actually came up again today. One of the limitations of the current org permission model is that you can make people "team maintainers" which allows them to add and remove people from a team but because they don't have permission to invite them to the org they can only do this for existing org members. We really need some tooling or a bot that can help us liberalize access to inviting people to the org.

[williamkapke]

Yes- very do-able & wouldn't take too long. What workflow do you imagine to do this?

@mikeal Can you give me some background on:
https://github.com/nodejs/email/blob/master/iojs.org/aliases.json

It is pretty much obvious what it is... but what extent is it used for?

I think it would be helpful if there was a central doc that listed the Committees/WGs (actually the repos), the members- and meta data about them. The GitHub offers a private API endpoint https://api.github.com/orgs/nodejs/teams - but it seems like additional metadata is needed.

Then that/those file(s) could be monitored for changes and apply them to the org when merges happen. I would then suggest the bot is put in charge of sync'ing the lists of Committee/WG members across all of the docs that are out here (via PRs).

Another way to approach it would be to just issues commands via comments- but that seems like the actions would be scattered all around the repos.

[Fishrock123]

We should probably consolidate efforts with the website WG on this, they already have a bot for issues with travis as described in nodejs/nodejs.org#355

Currently it is at https://github.com/nodejs-github-bot/bot, I think @phillipj runs it?

[Fishrock123]

I'd also like to extend said bot to schedule meetings automatically for the CTC and TSC.

[williamkapke]

@Fishrock123 yup! I already started sketching down some thoughts on what it might do: williamkapke/orgbot#2

[phillipj]

We should probably consolidate efforts with the website WG on this, they already have a bot for issues with travis as described in nodejs/nodejs.org#355

Absolutely. nodejs-github-bot was made to help automate whatever we need in the nodejs organization, not just nodejs.org.

@williamkapke feel free to open issues and PRs on https://github.com/nodejs-github-bot/bot

[Fishrock123]

@phillipj mind adding us to the org?

[mikeal]

should we move this to the nodejs org?

[phillipj]

should we move this to the nodejs org?

Sounds like a good idea. I just converted the nodejs-github-bot into an organization too invite more people in, but that wasn't too smart of me as the bot doesn't have its own user anymore, so it's basically broken ATM :(

[phillipj]

Fixed it by making the nodejs-github-bot an ordinary user again.

@mikeal @Fishrock123 added you as collaborators on the bot repo. Feel free to move it to the nodejs org if you want to.

[Fishrock123]

I think the owner needs to move it. Maybe also make @williamkapke a collaborator there for now? Idk

[williamkapke]

Adding a note here that this bot cannot have a org level webhook. Per:
nodejs/nodejs.org#539 (comment)

[jasnell]

Given that we now have a bot and there's been no further discussion on this issue, closing!