Minerva’s primary functionality is to remind users of upcoming meetings and events through its integration with the Waterloo Rocketry Google Calendar. The Slackbot utilizes the Google Calendar event’s description to store metadata about the meeting which allows for a high level of configuration on how it manages these events.
Presently, Minerva sends two reminders for all meetings: one six hours in advance and another five minutes in advance. These reminders can optionally include a list of agenda items to provide an overview of the event. In addition, the six-hour reminder automatically includes message reactions that can be used gauge event turnout. This can be seen below:
The five-minute reminder can include event location info and links for online meetings:
The alerts for the event reminders can be configured in a variety of ways, including their intrusiveness (e.g. an @channel versus a DM being sent) and the channels for which their members should be notified.
Creating Calendar Events for use With Minerva
Important: Do not attempt to modify the descriptions of Google Calendar events that have been initialized for use with Minerva unless you know what you are doing.
Initializing a Google Calendar event for use with Minerva requires the event’s description to be populated with the necessary JSON metadata. Since JSON is annoying to type up and a single missed quote can result in disaster, Minerva provides a command to go through the initialization process through a modal in Slack.
1. Create an event on Google Calendar
If it has not already been done, start off by creating an event that you would like to get notifications from Minerva for on the Waterloo Rocketry Google Calendar. If this is a reoccurring meeting,
2. Invite Minerva to the channels that you would like it to notify in
3. Initialize the calendar event using the /initialize command
…
If this is a reoccurring meeting, edit the calendar event and configure it to repeat. Doing so after initializing the event will ensure that the event metadata will be copied to all following reoccurring meetings.
Editing Events After Creation
using /meeting edit
Troubleshooting
[note that the #minerva-logs channel exists]
Minerva is no longer notifying me of an upcoming event
[remove the event description and reinitialize it]