Zak, since you built the bot, would you mind working with Trey to put together a sentence explaining how it works? The key is to make it clear that the twitter bot interaction is entirely optional, "just for fun". It's a way for someone to promote their Open Spaces event. This blog post that you are writing the sentence for with
trey is for the public, so they will only interact with the bot through tweets with the hashtag #pyconopenspaces. In addition, Open Spaces organizers (like myself) can tweet on behalf of any events in order to help the bot promote an event that we see on the scheduling poster boards. The poster boards are where PyCon attendees put up cards to schedule/suggest an open spaces meetup.
Trey, the bot simply extracts date, time and room number from any tweets that contain #pyconopenspaces . If the tweet looks like someone promoting a valid open spaces event time slot that no one else has yet "claimed" with the bot, the bot will retweet the tweet 15 minutes before the event. It, of course, can't verify that that event exists on the scheduling poster boards, however. Organizers, like you and I and Anna will have access to the twitter bot's schedule and can delete any tweets that are inappropriate or have the bot ignore (blacklist) any accounts that are spamming that hashtag. And we'll have some pretty robust spam filters in place. It may not retweet all the legitimate openspaces tweets, but it will be highly unlikely to embarrass us. And it will not be tweeting from an official pycon account. We can set that account to whatever you and Anna would like. The current test account is @tw_testy . That's where the promotional tweets will come from, not a name attendees need to remember or tweet to.