A Slack standup bot, from the morning DM to the summary

What a Slack standup bot does, and what this one does

A standup bot asks each person the same few questions every working morning and puts the answers somewhere the team will actually read them. That is the whole category. Morgenruf does it entirely inside Slack: a direct message at your local hour, a summary in the channel an hour later, and nothing to log into. The dashboard is for whoever sets it up, and most weeks they do not open it either.

This page is the general one. The two questions that follow it usually are the licence and the hosting, which have pages of their own: what the MIT licence covers and where the container and the database end up.

• A direct message at your local hour with your team's questions.
• A summary in the channel, grouped by person or by question, blockers pulled out, optionally in a thread.
• Slash commands: /standup, /skip, /kudos @teammate a reason, /help.
• An App Home tab with your standups, your streak, your remaining kudos, and buttons for vacation and pausing coffee chats.
• Group introductions for coffee chats, with the time vote in the message.

The scopes it asks for

Standups need to read channel membership, write messages, and open DMs. Coffee chats add three scopes for group DMs and timezones. Kudos needs emoji read access to use your own token. There is no scope for reading channel history, because it never does. Every scope, with the reason.

The settings page shows the Slack message it will produce, as you edit it.

What it is not

• Not a meeting recorder or a transcript bot.
• Not a productivity score. There is no ranking of people by output.
• Not something you have to run. The hosted instance is free; self-hosting is the option for teams that want the data in their own database.

Adding it to your workspace

The quick way is the Add to Slack button: it installs Morgenruf on the free hosted instance in about two minutes. To self-host, create the app from the manifest, install it, invite the bot to a channel, and make your first standup. That route is about twenty minutes. Either way, the ten minutes after that go on the standup itself: questions, hour, timezones, who is in it, what happens when someone is on leave. If you are still deciding, how this lines up against the hosted standup bots is the page for that.