The Loomio Blog

Loomio cofounder Richard D. Bartlett chats with Matthew Luxon, Auckland changemaker and Loomio champ Matthew Luxon is director of Envision NZ. They develop ideas for social benefit, especially those related to waste and resource recovery: e.g. establishing community recycling centres. “Last year I was working on a project in the Waikato region, with a wide range of stakeholders. As I’m driving from Auckland to Hamilton over and over again, I’m thinking: there must be a better way. Loomio would have halved those trips!”

Alanna from Loomio caught up with Jessy Kate Schingler and Brittany Ferrero in San Francisco, where they were gathering with other social entrepreneurs connected to Enspiral. They took some time out to talk about how collaboration works in their co-living hotel.

Alanna met Benjamin Tincq and Francesca Pick at POC21, an open source hardware innovation camp in a castle in France, which OuiShare was a core convener of. They stepped out to share how they collaborate as a large-scale international distributed community.

Alanna from Loomio met Romain Chanut at POC21, a 6 week innovation camp in France focused on open source hardware for sustainability. Romain was there with his “Do It Together” JerryCan – a low cost computer you can assemble from recycled materials. We took a break from hacking on hardware to learn more about his other role, as a digital transformer in a social media collective. I highly suggest to check some good reviews on a working monitor, so you make sure to the always get the best quality possible.

Alanna from Loomio met Manon Piazza at POC21, where we were occupying a disused castle outside Paris, prototyping a sustainable society and hacking on open source hardware.

For the last few months, we’ve been progressively bringing more and more people over from Loomio Beta onto the new Loomio user interface. As of tomorrow, all new user accounts will start on the new interface.

If you’ve read the introductory guide to making great decisions with Loomio, you’re ready to learn about some of the creative ways you can use proposals.

Spring has sprung 🙂 Hi friends! Spring has arrived here in Aotearoa and it is gorgeous! We’ve got a lot of juicy stories to share this month:

Here in the Loomio team, we have been using Loomio since it was only a pie graph with buttons, and we've learnt a few things along the way.

Here's a quick update with all the latest news from Loomio land for August 🙂

We recently returned from one of our biannual strategy weekends.

Working efficiently as a group is complex. Part of the puzzle is to find a balance between in-person meetings  and online collaboration.

Rich has been doing a lot of design work for Loomio lately.

More than 86,000 people have joined Loomio, making more than 28,000 decisions in nearly 100 countries, so it's feeling like we're really starting to have some impact in the world!

The Equally Well Summit brought people from diverse backgrounds together to discuss a critical problem. Loomio enabled engaging participants prior to, during, and after the conference – helping turn talk into action.

I had the immense honour of being invited to participate in the g0v Summit in Taipei last year. The Summit was basically a chance for 700 people to get together and discuss the future of democracy, and hack on some projects that might help us get there faster.

Loomio is co-hosting the Open Source // Open Society conference, April 16-17 in Wellington, New Zealand, alongside GitHub, Chalkle, and Enspiral. Get your ticket and join us at the event!

This is the first article in our Cultural Technology series, where we share practices for working in a networked organisation. This is very much a work in progress but we hope it’s valuable to share what we’re learning.

We’re building this organisation on the principle that anyone affected by a decision should be involved in making it.

Loomio has received a small grant from Catalyst to help Litemap and Assembl develop their collective intelligence tools. These tools enable users to map the structure of a discussion and visualise the connections between people, thought and action.

Ever failed at getting your team engaged with new technology? We have. Like many other people, we started off naively thinking that just exposing the team to new technology was enough – that once they saw it, they'd get excited to use it. Since then, we've worked with hundreds of groups and learned a lot about how to effectively introduce new online tools.

The Ministry of Economic Affairs, R.O.C. (MoEA) announced that the National Energy Conference is to be held Jan 26, 27. To follow the trends of collecting voices on the internet in nowadays, MoEA plans pre-conference discussions on the internet between Jan 14 – 20.

Well folks it has been an incredible few months and today is a very special day: we’re inviting everyone (starting with those who supported our crowdfunding campaign) to come in and check out a ‘pre-release’ version of Loomio 1.0.

We went out to the Loomio Community asking for feedback on the new designs for mobile/phone and desktop/tablet. In addition to some excellent suggestions for improvements on the designs, you told us you loved them! We can’t wait to release the new user interface at the end of November.

By Ben Knight, co-founder, @Loomio @benjaminmknight _ Yesterday, 100,000 people mobilized in the streets of Budapest, in response to a proposed tax on Internet access. > “The Internet tax is a symbol of the government's authoritarianism – we not only need to defeat the Internet tax, we need to believe that we are capable of criticizing and influencing the state.' >_ – Zsolt Varadi, speaking out in a crowd of close to 100,000 protesters in central Budapest yesterday. Two years ago, large-scale protests in Hungary against education cuts turned very rapidly into a civic movement against an increasingly authoritarian government. In early 2012, Loomio was still in closed beta and we weren’t accepting new signups. All we had was a rough prototype, and our tiny team had no capacity to support new users. One Tuesday morning in February, a group request came in from a network of Hungarian student activists, who said they wanted to use Loomio because they were democratically organising in opposition to radical government education cuts.

Another month has flown by, with some more huge progress in Loomio land: