Bringing the Company Directory to Life, on Slack
How we hope to make online teamwork more personal with our new app for Slack
It took us a while but we are finally ready to unveil our second Slack app. We are calling it Hiki and it’s now available on Slack’s App Directory and its sassy, new website.
With Hiki you can easily tag anyone on your Slack team with their skills, interests or field of expertise. Simply type a word representing a personal attribute or ability and it gets added to that person’s profile. It can be html, baking, excel, skateboarding, or pretty much anything else.
It’s an open system, much like a wiki: anyone on your team can be tagged, and anyone can add or remove tags. Everything takes place via Slack’s slash command too, so you can tag your colleagues right inside of Slack.
For example, to upvote your colleague @sammy’s expertise in excel you can type /hiki tag @sammy +excel. You can also look up who else is handy with excel by typing /hiki list excel or view all of your team’s tags by typing /hiki list.
Our goal is to help teams working in Slack find out who on their roster has the know-how to tackle a specific task or solve a problem. We also want to make it easier for anyone to recognize their teammates for their work and provide insights into strengths and talents of the team as a whole.
In a way, though, what we really want is to bring the company directory to life. Put a system in place that will turn our online avatars into richer, more pliable and more personal portraits of who we actually are. Something that will help teams get to know each other and get closer together.
We hope Hiki is a step forward in that direction. That it will help teams collaborating online get a better picture of what their interests, talents and skills are, and what everyone cares about. No matter if it’s excel or skateboarding.
