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Ask HN: Instant Messages with a Public Record?

4 pointsby mdnahasover 1 year ago
I’m a volunteer on a commission for the City of Austin. The commission is required to comply with Texas’s Open Meetings Act. Any communication by at least a quorum of commissioners must be publicly available.<p>The problem is that Slack and text messages don’t keep a public record. I could write a script that daily downloads Slack’s archive, converts it to HTML, and posts the HTML on a website. But I’d prefer a product, so citizens don’t have to trust me and my script.<p>Do you know of a service that does that? It doesn’t have to be Slack. Any instant messenger with good smartphone and web support would be acceptable. A way to record text messages (SMS or MMS) might also work.

1 comment

coderintheryeover 1 year ago
Would it be possible to allow members of the public to join the Slack channel as read-only members, thus being able to verify that your script is doing what it says it does? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slack.com&#x2F;help&#x2F;articles&#x2F;360004635551-Manage-channel-posting-permissions-" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slack.com&#x2F;help&#x2F;articles&#x2F;360004635551-Manage-channel-...</a><p>Otherwise, I would think rocket.chat has this capability, albeit indirectly, where you can federate the data and&#x2F;or allow public access to messages via API as well as to the audit record of the messages.