EthSafari Coordination Bot

EthSafari brought more than 300 African developers to Kenya in September 2024, and the coordination team behind it was small. The math of that situation is unforgiving: hundreds of attendees with legitimate questions about schedules, venues, and logistics, and a handful of humans who could answer them. Without tooling, every gap in communication becomes a queue of direct messages.

I built the event a coordination bot to absorb that load. Attendees interacted with it in Telegram, where the community already coordinated, and the bot framework sat in front of a serverless AWS architecture, making authenticated API calls into services that handled scheduling, announcements, and information gathering. Announcements reached everyone at once instead of rippling through group chats, schedule questions were answered by the system that held the schedule, and the architecture cost nothing while idle, which for an event workload is most of the time.

The deployment succeeded on the measure that mattered: it reduced the number of messages the human support team had to deal with, freeing a small staff to handle the problems that genuinely required a person. It also held up under the realities of an international event, where attendees arrive across days, connectivity varies, and the information that matters changes hourly.

The same serverless pattern, a chat-native interface backed by pay-per-use AWS services, carried a related engagement for MetaCamp, a founders’ retreat program, covered in its own entry. Together they are a fair snapshot of how I like to solve operations problems: find the friction, put the interface where people already are, and let managed services do the running.