Meetups

Welcome to Meetups, a Slack bot that helps you meet interesting people in your company or organization! It randomly pairs people in a Slack channel for 1:1 chats.

How it works

To participate, join a Slack channel that’s using Meetups. In your Slack workspace, that is:

Introduce yourself to Meetups

Channel admins decide when rounds of pairing start; it’s often weekly or biweekly. The next time a round is about to begin, Meetups will message you to ask you to introduce yourself:

Screenshot of a conversation showing the Meetups Slack bot greeting a user who has joined a channel and asking them for an introduction.

Reply to this message with a short introduction to register for the upcoming round.

Get paired

Sometime after you reply (usually within 24 hours), Meetups will make 1:1 pairings by adding you to a direct message with another person. You’ll be sent each other’s intros there:

Screenshot of a group direct message that Meetups has started among two participants. It shows their intros to each other and tells them to pick a time to meet.

Coordinate a time to meet in this chat.

Future pairings

After participating in a pairing round for the first time, Meetups will ask if you want to participate in future rounds:

Screenshot of Meetups asking if the user wants to meet up with someone this week, with options to opt in or skip.

Busy week? No worries, you can skip and join another time. Meetups requires everyone to opt in to being paired each round to ensure ongoing interest and availability among participants.

Give feedback

After you’ve been through a pairing round, Meetups may ask if you actually met the person you paired with:

Screenshot of Meetups asking if the user met with their last pairing, with options for yes and no.

Whether you did or not, please let the bot know!

View channel stats

Meetups compiles statistics about pairing channels. This includes how many pairings were made, how many people actually met, a leaderboard, and a network graph of who’s met who.

For your workspace, the stats page(s) are here:

FAQ

How does Meetups decide what pairings to make?

Meetups randomly pairs people while trying to avoid pairs that have been made previously. For curious nerds, you can find the pairing algorithm here.

How can I update my intro text?

Message Meetups “update intro” (or similar phrases). It will ask you for your new intro text.

I messaged Meetups and it didn’t reply. What’s up with that?

Most likely, it was a message that Meetups didn’t know how to respond to, which frankly is most free-text queries. Unknown queries are sent to your Meetups bot admin who may later respond to you from the bot.

Can I participate in multiple channels’ meetups?

Yes! Just join your channels of interest. Meetups will use the same intro text across all your channels, but it will allow you to individually opt in or out of each channel’s pairings every round.

How do I stop receiving messages from Meetups?

Meetups works purely on channel membership for whom to message. If you want to stop participating, just leave the channel(s) where it’s setup and you’ll stop receiving messages. You can always rejoin later to resume receiving messages about opting in for pairing.

How can I set up Meetups on my own Slack workspace?

Meetups is an open-source project! See the code and learn how to set it up on GitHub.