The Loomio Blog

The best thing about building Loomio is hearing how groups are using it in their communities. It was humbling to learn about a cooperative effort between direct democracy groups in Greece, planning an ambitious experiment in citizen democracy across the country, using Loomio as their main platform.

Ami Dar, founder of Idealist.org, lends his support to Loomio during the livestream announcement of Idealist's new platform for changemakers. Loomio and Idealist's new platform share the same goal: using technology to turn ideas and connection into collective action to better our communities and societies.

> Improving our decision making skills is one of way to improve the world that we live in. Much of the happiness, and a lot of the suffering in our world comes down to the quality of decisions that we make, and the decisions that other people make that affect us.

Our Crowdfunding campaign for Loomio 1.0 went live today! Help us build a truly inclusive platform that allows anyone, anywhere to participate in the decisions that affect their lives, by supporting our campaign here: love.loomio.org

> Urban Adventures are a startup with staff and partners spread across the globe. General Manager Tony Carne explains how Loomio has helped them manage conversations across the continents. We have just finished our first 12 months using Loomio as our go-to tool for collaborative decision-making. To give you an idea of our business, Urban Adventures Limited has eight staff.  I’m in Melbourne, four are in Hanoi, one in London and two in Toronto. On top of that we have local Urban Adventure Partners in over 90 destinations, on six continents around the world.

Over the last couple of weeks the London School of Economics has experimented with  crowdsourcing a constitution for the UK using Loomio. Jack Bailey from LSE – Public Affairs has written about the experience so far. Thanks Jack!

Loomio is excited to apply as a participating organisation in Google Summer of Code, which pairs university students from around the world with mentors at open source projects.

Happy New Year everyone! Loomio has a chance to get our year off on an awesome footing. We are currently in the running for the MIX Prize Digital Freedom Challenge – a competition run by the Management Innovation Exchange (MIX) for organisations who are encouraging and providing for increased autonomy in the workplace.

Greetings Loomions! Our second year at the Loomio Cooperative has turned out to be an action-packed and exciting time of developing the product, expanding the team, and spreading the word about Loomio.

We’ve been invited to speak at the World Forum for Democracy in Strasbourg, which has been the catalyst for our trip to Europe.

Thoughts en route: I am considering what it is I want from a trip as extensive and full as this one. Madrid, London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Strasbourg, New York, Rhode Island, Washington, Boston and San Francisco.

Generation Zero is a youth-led network of climate change activists who are campaigning to make New Zealand zero carbon by 2050. They want to create conversations and actions to ensure that “today’s carbon bills get paid today”. The core members and volunteers previously made decisions at biannual national meetings but as the network grew to over 3,000 members they needed to change how they made decisions. They decided to invite 60 of their most active members to make strategic decisions for the group in Loomio, though the invitation was open to any member to request access. Once decisions are made, they are relayed out to the wider group through social media.

We may only be there for 28 hours, but our  stay in Madrid  is already packed with action.

Next stop on our exploration of the globe: Europe and the United States! Ben Knight and Vivien Maidaborn, two of the co-founders and dream-weavers of the Loomio Cooperative, are setting off from the Land of the Long White Cloud, Aotearoa, and are on their way to the Northern Hemisphere!

Hey there, Jon here, from the Loomio product team. I've been working pretty hard on some new designs for Loomio, and thought it'd be nice to share with everyone.

In February 2013, the Wellington City Council contracted Loomio to run the online side of their largest public consultation exercise of the year – developing an alcohol management strategy for the city. The Council chose Loomio because they wanted to get diverse input from people who would usually be too busy to attend traditional public consultation meetings. What resulted was a lively mixture of bar owners, students, residents associations, liquor industry employees, emergency services staff, teenagers and anti-alcohol campaigners, all getting together online in a month-long collaboration focused on finding solutions that balance the negative impacts of alcohol on communities with the social and economic benefits that come from a thriving entertainment scene in the city.

Name: Mix Age: 29 Title: Scrum-Master Mix Team: Product Team ## Why did you get involved with Loomio? It started off as a coding internship in Enspiral. I was interested in honing my skills and Loomio was interested in volunteers. In retrospect, it’s probably no accident that Loomio resonated so well with me – I’d recently come from working in a progressive secondary school which values things like collaborative planning of individual education pathways, community engagement and communicating on equal footings.

The Newtown Ethical Lending Trust was established in March 2012 to assist people in Newtown, Wellington, New Zealand with interest free loans.

Viv is a driving force behind Loomio — and one of the most well connected members of our group. It's become a joke in the team that if we need to find more users, we should just send Viv for a walk down the street — she's sure to bump into at least five people she knows. But finding users is only small part of the amazing-ness that is Viv, she helps us map our course through social impact, casts magic spells before parties, and helps us keep diversity top of mind. Here is Viv, in her own words: Name: Vivien Maidaborn Age: 53 Title: Loomio Dreamer and Vision Maker (aka business strategy) ## Why and how did you get involved with Loomio? After a 30 year career in the not-for-profit sector, I realised that charity models weren’t delivering scalable change anywhere in the world. In fact, most of the baseline measures (economic + social inequality, environmental degradation, etc.) I had thought would improve in my working life were actually getting worse. So, it felt to me like real social change would have to combine the skills, tools and the leverage of business, with the values, emotional intelligence and compassion that can be found in community and citizenship movements.  This for me is what I mean by ‘social enterprise'. In 2011 I resigned from my charitable CEO job and went looking for the right opportunity in this social enterprise space. I was introduced to Loomio and the rest is history!

Enspiral is a collective made up of individuals and companies that use the tools of business to create scalable social change. It’s mission is to get more people working on stuff that matters. > “Powerful things take place when like minded people connect, we've seen this repeatedly, where conversations spark ideas, which become projects, that grow into world changing ventures. Enspiral is a virtual and physical network where this happens.” Because Enspiral is a collective, meaning no bosses, they’ve had to bootstrap their own collective decision-making system. They found that email was too convoluted for important decisions, and face-to-face meetings too time-consuming. This left just a few people feeling like they were always making the decisions. Enter Loomio. 18 months ago, Enspiral helped found Loomio, and has been using the tool ever since, to help run this complex boss-less organisation without compromising on effectiveness.

A few weeks ago, we laid out our code roadmap for the future of Loomio – and we’ve been hard at work travelling along it! We’re pretty excited about the places we have been, and those still to come. Here’s a whirlwind tour of our journey, so you can start getting just as excited as we are! In the past two weeks, our code team have rolled out two new features: * You can now make an attachment of an image or document, which appears as a thumbnail in your post. * You also have the first version of your very own inbox, which displays discussions you’ve not read, giving you a clear idea of what you need to catch up on. ## Why is this important? Attachment is important because everyone has been asking for it 🙂 We’ve tried to release it as quickly as possible, knowing that there’s room to keep improving as we go. For instance, we’ll be improving performance of this feature in the near future to make it faster.