Quote, Unquote, Alley: Fostering community on our remote team
Alley
Alleybot has been a beloved part of the Alley team since 2014 — helping with scrum tooling, backlog refinement, reminders, and other useful tasks in and out of Slack. And just like the rest of our team, Alleybot likes to have fun and showcase his witty personality. One way Alleybot does that is by being the keeper of memorable quotes.
Ever since Alleybot quoted his first-ever message on August 21, 2017 (the same day as a historical solar eclipse, mind you), he has quoted 13,356 messages. How? Whenever someone says something fit for the books, anyone on our team can react with the :alleybot-quote: emoji in Slack. If a quorum of three (or more) use it, the quote gets recorded for posterity.
This ever-expanding list of jokes and adages can be called on at any time when our teammates say “alleybot quote.” They can request a quote from a specific person (by tagging them) or a specific subject.
Alleybot will respond with a choice bit of wisdom from his collection— usually far more entertaining with a complete lack of context. (The quote does link to the original message, but where’s the fun in that?)
Whether Alleybot is reminding us about a great moment from the past or introducing us to a random thought from moments ago — it’s been a great way to bring us together, wherever we are in the world. (And as a fully remote team, it’s a particularly welcome sentiment.)
While you can’t have Alleybot (he’s ours!), your team can install Helperbot — a Slack app we built to foster Slack-based Scrum tooling for remote and co-located teams.
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