President Obama is now reachable via Facebook Messenger using a White House chat bot. Users can send the POTUS messages, ten of which will be read by him at the end of the day. The developers of the bot are now making it open source as well in an effort to encourage other government agencies to connect with their citizens the same way.
Perhaps more than any other president in U.S. history, Barrack Obama has had the most open policy when it comes to interacting with the American people. He made history by being the first president to reply to a Facebook message in public, Tech Times reports, and has since participated in numerous activities on the internet and on TV.
Now, President Obama is on Messenger where users can reach him by interacting with a bot. The messages will then be filtered and ten will be chosen to be read by him at the end of his day every day.
Aside from essentially opening the social media messaging door of the White House to the public, they are now making the chat bot open-source for other developers to take advantage of, Fossbyte reports. According to the chief digital officer of the White House, Jason Goldman, this is to enable other government agencies that might have no tech expertise to have others do it for them.
"We are open-sourcing a Drupal module, complete with easy steps and boiler plate code," Goldman’s blog post reads. "This will enable Drupal 8 developers to quickly launch a Facebook Messenger bot. We also left a few lines in the repository describing our hopes for the future of the code and encouraging members of the developer community to get involved.”
By basically allowing the wider development community to get involved, the government could have a more complex and ultimately more appealing line of communication with the public in the future. It could also go very wrong, though, with some developers causing havoc with the Messenger bot as a joke.