I've recently started to work on a tool that aims at making the planning and the execution of real-world activities a little less tedious, and sharing the learnt experience a little bit easier. 

The idea is to capture the outline of a social activity into a playbook, a graphical+code representation of the different stages of the activity and the transitions between those stages, eg [1].

Those playbooks can then be shared, forked & improved,and executed by a runtime that attempts to move from stage to stage automatically and asks for manual input when it can't.

I've pushed to [2] a simple ocsigen app that provides

 - an API to write playbooks, with helpers to use emails to trigger events & react to people's inputs, define cron tasks, etc

 - a sandbox that can be used to run a playbook step by step and observe its behavior

 - an executor capable of running a playbook for real users using an email server

It is a very early implementation, definitely not a turn-key product, but I'm already using it to organize recurring dinners for a group of parents, as well as some children activities (it's deployed at [3]).

My goal with this project is to build a library of effective playbooks for a wide range of activities, share what I learnt while setting up these activities and learn from other people's experiences.

This post is already way too long but if some of you are interested in learning more about the project, make suggestions and/or contribute to it, please get in touch. 

As usual, a big thanks to the ocsigen team & the ocaml community for all these amazing tools!

william

 

[1] https://github.com/accretio/accretio/blob/master/playbooks/demo.ml

[2] https://github.com/accretio/accretio

[3] https://accret.io

  

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