How to use our Constituent Case bot to keep track of your open cases

The philosophy behind Legislata is that, when it comes to working in policy, there is no one size that fits all, even within the same organization. You can join different communities, create new ones, and upgrade them to include premium features like task management and even an email client.

As part of this approach, we’re building bots. These are mini-apps that can do a specific function for you within Legislata without requiring you to upgrade the overall tier of your workspace. They’re simple to add - all you need to do is add the right topic tag and the system will do the rest for you.

Here is how you can use one of the first bots, the Constituent Case bot, to keep track of your open constituent cases and see at a glance what’s happening in your community.

What is does

The Constituent Case bot allows you to create new constituent cases to follow simply by creating a tag and then will tell you how many open cases you have, how many have been created or updated recently, and what they’re relating to. It will also keep all of your posts related to a constituent case in one place so that you can check at a glance what’s happening with your office’s casework.

Using this bot will cost $3 per user per month (with a one month free trial). No credit card needed - just create the topic tag along with the steps below and we’ll be in touch with the invoice after the trial month is ending.

How to use it - Step by Step

The Constituent Case bot can be set up within a few minutes and no coding necessary. Here’s what you’ll do.

Step 1: Identify or create the Office you want cross-posted into

The bot will summarize all posts in a specific workspace for you, so first you’ll choose what that workspace is. It can be your personal office, which you’re given automatically when you sign up, or one that you create once you’re in the app to which you can invite other members.

Step 2: Add “Constituent Cases” as a topic

The summarizer will look for posts with the topic tag “Constituent Cases”, so you’ll have to create that as a topic tag. You can do that by creating a new topic in the topics page or by adding it as a topic on your first post about a case. Don’t worry about the description. The bot will fill that in later.

Step 3: Create a subtopic for each new constituent case

When a new case happens, you’ll make a new subtopic for it, with constituent case as the related topic. This will be done with the blue +New Subtopic button in the subtopics page. This lets the bot know that posts with this topic are ones that we’ll be tracking.

Step 4: Create your introductory post about the constituent case

When a new case happens, you’ll of course want to take some notes about it. When you do that, all you need to add is “%status:open” in the description and the case it relates to as a subtopic tag. That lets the bot know that this is a case we should be tracking and including in our summary statistics.

You can add other topics and contacts to this post and the bot will add those to your overall summary. These could be other issues that it relates to or other people and organizations you want to be remembered along with this case, as many as you’d like.

Step 5: Add other posts as needed throughout the case

As the case progresses, you may want to add more notes for this. It’s as simple as creating a new note and tagging it with the correct case as a subtopic tag. You’ll automatically get a feed of those notes when you go into that case tag.

If you’re responsible for a particular case, you can also set up a notification for that subtopic tag and be alerted when someone else in your office works on it.

Step 6: Close the case when it’s done

When the case has been resolved, go back to the original introductory post and change %status:open to %status:closed. The case will still be saved, but it will no longer be part of your daily summary stats. Your workflow is clear and you’re ready to move onto the next one.

That’s it!

It’s that simple to create your own constituent case tracker. Let us know how else we can help and what other bots we can build that can make working in democracy just a little bit easier.