The Slackbot that 18F uses to connect a diverse, remote team

One of the oft-cited perks that comes along with working at 18F is that you can live anywhere in the country.

The “business inside the federal government” works hard to support remote employees, but there are some downsides to having coworkers that you hardly ever meet face-to-face. One example? Getting to know a coworker, especially someone on another team, can be hard if he lives in Wyoming and you live in Georgia.
So how does 18F manage the challenges? Virtual coffee dates.
Developer Tony Garvan told Technical.ly that virtual coffees are an “institution” at 18F, something employees are encouraged to do from the moment they join. But Garvan began to notice a bug in this system — lots of people wanted to do virutal coffees to get to know teammates better, and yet relatively few of these meetups were actually taking place.
“It occurred to me that this was a problem where the barriers and risks were just too high: in order to set up a virtual coffee, you had to reach out to a random person, and, despite the very friendly folks at 18F, there’s a good chance that person would be busy or not in the mood for coffee that week or whatever,” Garvan said.
Garvan knew the issue wasn’t lack of supply or demand. Maybe, the developer in him thought, this can be solved with a little bit of software.
“I wanted to make some sort of matchmaking program, so I floated the idea around to the team and people really liked it, so I starting thinking more about it,” Garvan said.
The first question that needed to be answered — where would this program live? “At first I was thinking of building a web app for this, but web apps require authentication, a user interface, and they require people actually find a link somewhere and click on it,” he said. “But the whole point of this program was that it has a super lower barrier to entry.”
And that’s when Garvan hit on this idea: “Having seen the success of our onboarding bot Dolores Landingham, I thought a Slack bot would be a cool option, since it would be much easier to setup and use than a web app.”
So Garvan built Coffeemate.

Coffeemate is a slackbot which helps team members get to know each other by setting them up on virtual coffees. https://t.co/fBjluTk0nm

— melody joy kramer (@mkramer) March 14, 2016

It’s pretty simple — once the Coffeemate bot is set up, you can direct message @coffeemate, or invite @coffeemate to a public channel, and ask it to “coffee me.” From there, Coffeemate will pair you with another user who requested coffee.
Garvan told Technical.ly that people started using Coffeemate right away, and though there were a few initial bugs these have since been smoothed out and the response is “overwhelmingly positive.”
“Just yesterday a colleague told me he has made it a weekly ritual to use the bot to get coffee,” Garvan reflected.
18F recently turned two years old, and in showcasing birthday vitals the organization announced that it now has a total team size of 178, with staff in no less than 30 cities around the country. That’s quite a spread. Programs like Coffeemate can help maintain a “company culture,” even among employees whose day-to-day might look starkly different.
As Garvan put it, “having an ultra low risk, low barrier to spend time with people is a great way to develop office culture, trade ideas, and break down barriers between groups.”