HACKER Q&A
📣 mdnahas

Instant Messages with a Public Record?


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.

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.

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.

  👤 coderintherye Accepted Answer ✓
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? https://slack.com/help/articles/360004635551-Manage-channel-...

Otherwise, I would think rocket.chat has this capability, albeit indirectly, where you can federate the data and/or allow public access to messages via API as well as to the audit record of the messages.