Loomio

Embedded Matrix chatbox for each Loomio group

DS Danyl Strype Public Seen by 85

Nomadic Labs have built an open-source embeddable chatbox using Matrix for the OCRCC (Ontario Coalition of Rape Crisis Centres) to allow survivors of sexual violence to communicate and seek help safely with OCRCC facilitators. This chatbox lives at https://github.com/nomadic-labs/ocrcc-chatbox - and it has a pretty nice feature set, including end-to-end encryption support.

https://matrix.org/blog/2020/05/01/this-week-in-matrix-2020-05-01

Any chance of something like this going on the roadmap for Loomio 3.0? It would be awesome if each Loomio group could have a Matrix room, with an embedded chatbox on their group page. Although some public groups might want to have open access to their room, it ought to be possible to use SSO to restrict access to the Matrix room to members of the Loomio group. Once device cross-signing is shipped for Matrix (due out this week, see that same link), private Loomio groups could have their Matrix room encrypted, without having to do the constant device verification dance that's been required up to now.

Extra for experts: a room and embedded chatbox for each subgroup too, and/or the ability to use the chatbox in the main group to login to a choice of rooms (a main room and one per subgroup).

A Loomio host could run their own Matrix homeserver to host these rooms and an account for each Loomio user, or set up a relationship with an existing one. But another way of handling it would be for users (who want to use chat) to enter their Matrix address when they create their account, or add it in their account settings. When a new Loomio group is created, the Matrix room could then be created on the homeservers hosting the accounts of all the group members (Matrix rooms can be distributed across the homeservers of any user in the room).

M

martin ➬ Mon 4 May 2020 4:18AM

I'd be happy to assist with running the homeserver, but someone needs to work on the Matrix integration. I know that this is outside of scope of the Loomio devs right now, but that's where the open-source nature comes in!!

RG

Robert Guthrie Mon 4 May 2020 4:27AM

Don't forget we support embedding an iframe anywhere you can put rich text, so it's likely you can just embed this within your group description without us doing anything.

JR

Jon Richter Wed 22 Jul 2020 3:36AM

The OCRCC Chatbox is now known as Safe Support Chatbox https://github.com/nomadic-labs/safesupport-chatbox, and also accompanied by a bot https://github.com/nomadic-labs/safesupport-bot, that issues private conversations with visitors of the chatbox, similar to a not-so-dead drop.

Embeddable rooms will land after this year's GSoC with HTML Embeddable Matrix Chat Rooms and are especially crafted for the intended use case.