Back in August, you may recall, the White House unveiled the first-ever government Facebook Messenger bot. We used it to send a message to President Obama. It was cool.
Now the team behind the project is taking it a step further and open-sourcing the code used to create the bot. As of this week, the Drupal module is up on GitHub, complete with step-by-step instructions.
“While Drupal may not be the platform others would immediately consider for building a bot,” writes chief digital officer Jason Goldman in a blog post announcing the open-sourcing, “this new White House module will allow non-developers to create bot interactions (with customized language and workflows), and empower other governments and agencies who already use Drupal to power their digital experiences.”
Since launch @POTUS has received 1.5M messages on FB. And today we're open-sourcing our bot code for everyone to use https://t.co/pvRthSsMtO
— J. Goldman -Archived (@Goldman44) October 14, 2016
Accessibility, it seems, is the key concept. Both that the code is accessible to developers and that other governments have the capability to use the bot to be more accessible to their constituencies. “Now, there is one less barrier to being more accessible and responsive to constituents,” Goldman writes. “We look forward to seeing what others build on top of this work.”
So who’s gonna go first?
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