Converting Slack’s Team Directory into virtual contact cards

I spent the summer as a fellow at University of Chicago’s Data Science for Social Good Fellowship (more on that later) where I got to work on optimizing EMS delivery in Cincinnati (additional press). I’m looking forward to talking about it more once the code and official blog post are made public.

Until then, I’m just going to throw up some random code snippets that resulted from the summer.

As far as I could tell, there’s no way to export the contact information out of Slack’s Team Directory into virtual cards that can be quickly and easily added to your phone’s contacts. And since I’m old school and prefer text and email to Slack (also because not every DSSG fellow had Slack on their phone), I wrote a simple script that converts the Team Directory into virtual cards.

Once they are in vcf form, all you need to do is click on them and add them to your phone. Some bugs exist (for example, profile pics only seems to work for iOS users), but it was hacked together pretty quickly — and the IETF spec is atrocious. For convenience, the script also outputs all contact info into a csv file.

Hopefully, at least one other person will use this before Slack decides to get their act together.