The goal of mobilizon_reshare is to provide a suite to reshare Mobilizon events on a broad selection of platforms. This tool enables an organization to automate their social media strategy in regards to events and their promotion.

Usage

Installation

mobilizon-reshare is distributed through Pypi. Use

pip install mobilizon-reshare

to install the tool in your system or virtualenv.

This should install the command mobilizon-reshare in your system. Use it to access the CLI and discover the available commands and their description.

Scheduling and temporal logic

The tool is designed to work in combination with a scheduler that executes it at regular intervals. mobilizon_reshare allows fine-grained control over the logic to decide when to publish an event, with the minimization of human effort as its first priority.

Configuration

The configuration is implemented through Dynaconf. It allows a variety of ways to specify configuration keys. Refer to their documentation to discover how configuration files and environment variables can be specified.

We provide a sample configuration in the settings.toml file and .secrets.toml file.

Use these files as the base for your custom configuration.

Publishers and notifiers

The first step to deploy your custom configuration is to specify the source Mobilizon instance and group and then activate the publishers and notifiers you're interested in. For each one of them, you have to specify credentials and options in the .secrets.toml file.

Publishing strategy

The second important step is to define when and how your posts should be published. mobilizon-reshare takes over the responsibility of deciding what and when to publish, freeing the humans from the need to curate the social media strategy around your events. This might mean very different things for different users and covering common use cases is a goal of this project. To do so though, you need to guide the tool and understand in detail the options available to configure it in accordance to the requirements of your desired social media strategy.

The first option you want to edit is publishing.window that defines the begin and end hours of your publication window. This means the time frame during the day in which the tool will consider to publish events. If begin>end, the window will be overnight (i.e begin=19 end=11, means the tool will publish from 7PM until 11 AM). For now, the hours taken into consideration are in the server's timezone.

A second important element is the selection strategy. This is the way the tool will decide which event to pick and publish among all those available. At every execution of mobilizon-reshare will publish at most one event so you have to consider how the selected strategy will interact with the external scheduling. The strategies assume that the schedule will fire at regular intervals, unless specified otherwise. These intervals can vary but they should be small compared to the publishing window. Ideally a few minutes to a couple hours.

Currently only one strategy is supported: next_event. The semantic of the strategy is the following: pick the next event in chronological order that hasn't been published yet and publish it only if at least break_between_events_in_minutes minutes have passed.

Recap

In addition to the event publication feature, mobilizon-reshare allows you to do periodical recap of your events. In the current version, the two features are handled separately and triggered by different CLI commands (respectively mobilizon-reshare start and mobilizon-reshare recap).

The recap command, when executed, will retrieve the list of already published events and summarize in a single message to publish on all the active publishers. At the moment it doesn't support any decision logic and will always publish when triggered.

Core Concepts

Publisher

A Publisher is responsible publishing an event or a message on a given platform.

Currently the following publishers are supported:

• Telegram
• Zulip
• Twitter

Notifier

Notifiers are similar to Publishers and share most of the implementation. Their purpose is to notify the maintainers when something unexpected happens.

Formatter

A formatter is responsible for the formatting and validation of an event or a message on a given platform. Different platform require different templates and rules and therefore formatting is considered a platform-specific issue.

Publication Strategy

A Publication Strategy is responsible for selecting the event to publish. Currently it's possible to publish only one event per run, under the assumption that the user will implement a social media strategy that doesn't require concurrent publishing of multiple events on the same platform. Through proper scheduling and configuration is still possible to achieve such behavior if required.

Coordinator

A coordinator is responsible for publishing a message or an event across different platforms using different logics. It uses publishers and formatters to compose and send the message and compile a report of how the publication went.

Develop

To run pre-commit hooks run pre-commit install after cloning the repository.

Make sure to have pre-commit installed in your active python environment. To install: pip install pre-commit. For more info: https://pre-commit.com/

Testing

To test, run poetry install and then poetry run pytest to execute the unit tests.

At the moment no integration test is present and they are executed manually. Reach out to us if you want to access the testing environment or you want to help automate the integration tests.

Contributing

We welcome contributions from anybody. Currently our process is not structured yet but feel free to open or take issues through Github in case you want to help us.