Coordinating the governance of an organization that spans continents and time zones is no small feat. The ICCA Consortium, a prominent international association supporting the global movement for Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ collective territories of life, used Loomio in their General Assembly (GA), for the second year running.

How do distributed decision making practices scale to 450 staff in 3 countries and multiple time zones? Luz Iglesias, Tamara Extian-Babiuk and Sagar Chatterjee at Raise and Loomio's Michael Elwood-Smith met for a campfire chat as part of the Greaterthan Solstice Jamboree.

We’re delighted to introduce a big update to proposal templates in Loomio. Loomio now includes a series of predefined proposal templates for common decision processes such as Advice process, Consent process and Consensus.

At the 2023 Sociocracy Conference, we were invited to introduce Loomio and demonstrate how it is used by organizations practicing Sociocracy for collective decision-making. Check out the video to learn more about Loomio and how to use it for collaborative governance.

Igalia is a worker-owned, employee-run cooperative consultancy focused on open source software and services. We recently sat down with co-founder Xavier Castaño to discuss their journey, their organizational model and their collective strategy setting processes.

With the latest release of Loomio you can define your own templates and workflows, then make them available for others in your organization to use.

Does your organization run on Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Mattermost or Matrix? Loomio has a chatbot for you!

Making decisions collaboratively is fundamental for any DAO looking to maximize the potential of its participants. Let’s look at why this is so important and how to do it well.

Much has happened in the world since February 2020. For companies and organizations all over the globe, innovative, fast paced thinking from Executive Teams and Boards have been the key to navigating the global pandemic. Board members have had to interact with each other in different ways - used to face-to-face meetings, they’re now increasingly making decisions via video calls.

LEDA is a cooperative of experienced architects and engineers who design outstanding sustainable buildings that are beautiful, comfortable to be in, and gentle on the planet.

Urban Space 500 is a Ukranian restaurant that gives 80% of its profits to community projects. They organize their 500 founders and gather their input with Loomio.

Loomio enabled the Green Party of West Australia’s wide-reaching membership to congregate, collaborate, and agree on policies quickly and efficiently together.

The Refugee Buddy Project Hastings, Rother & Weladen (TRBP) is celebrating universal humanity by welcoming and supporting newly arriving refugees to their UK town and using Loomio to organize their rapidly growing group.

Partago is a Belgium-based car-sharing citizen cooperative enterprise that offers only 100% electric cars. Their mission is to free up space in neighborhoods, reduce carbon emissions and toxic traffic fumes, and fight against climate change. Here’s how they are using Loomio to bring their mission to reality.

As humans embark deeper into the digital age, it is increasingly vital for companies to embrace communication tools, apps, and platforms. Behind almost every successful venture there is a team of software experts.

Keeping everyone up-to-date on the decisions happening in your organization can be tough and especially when you are working remotely. The good news? We have just released a big upgrade to make this easier.

We are fortunate to support many incredible organizations – each with their own particular management styles – and it’s not uncommon for us to adopt practices from groups in the Loomio community. When we learn from the examples of others, we are opening up ourselves (and our organizations) to growth. So, today we’re highlighting the Ian Martin Group’s journey to self-organization, a way of organizing that makes your company more resilient in the long term.

Just checking in to see how you are doing, and to share some new guides we've made available.

Communication can make or break any team or organization’s efforts. Save time, email confusion, and energy with higher quality conversations that move to action. Loomio’s discussion threads can help.

Case Study: Ian Martin Group made big changes to their organizational structure to ensure that their employees enjoy the most meaningful work experience. Here’s a look at their journey and how Loomio is helping them along the way.

It takes a long time for scientific articles to be published. After years of research and fine-tuning, the papers must be sent off for peer review, which can take six months or more.

If you’ve seen our last article with Loomio’s new features, that was just the beginning! Here’s our latest batch of improvements and new tools.

Making decisions with other people can be slow, expensive and emotionally draining, while coordinating team member schedules can be time-consuming. At the same time, making decisions without involving others can turn out to be equally — if not more — expensive and stressful, and can cause resentment amongst those who were not included.

Everything is new! It’s an exciting time for us at Loomio and also for our customers; we’ve listened to your feedback and here's the result — Loomio 2.0.

This creative community of makers and artists used Loomio to take the hassle out of decision-making, so they can have more time to focus on doing what they love. If, as a kid, you loved breaking things apart and learning how they worked, or creating things out of material like wood, cloth or cardboard you would fit right in at 1907 Triumph Street.

Teachers in New Zealand used Loomio to gain an important victory of increased pay and better working conditions for all teachers.

Zero Waste France consists of local groups scattered across the country, all dedicated to practicing and encouraging a zero-waste lifestyle. Loomio delivers a zero-stress communication tool that helps this community of activists create more impact.

In June of 2018, 30 members of Economic Democracy Advocates (EDA) gathered to ratify their cooperative charter.

Good conversations and great beer. That’s what led several friends living in Burlington, Vermont to form the Full Barrel Cooperative. Their mission is to establish the city’s first community-owned brewery.

It is the year 2019 and billions of people around the world still lack access to necessities like food, shelter and healthcare. Autocratic regimes and human rights abusers continue to capture news headlines, while populist leaders preach hate and intolerance. The state of human rights today can seem dismal, but the truth is these human rights challenges are not insurmountable. The Human Rights Measurement Initiative (HRMI) has set out to quantify each country’s human rights performance, using a first-of-its-kind human rights measurement framework.

Communities around the world are stepping up to the major challenge of our times by building a regenerative low carbon economy.

Hi there, I'm John. My work at Loomio is about groups' success. A big reason why Loomio exists is to help people collaborate to achieve successful outcomes. We are constantly surprised at the ways in which groups around the world use Loomio to do just that, with less time and effort, and this month we want to highlight some of that magic with…

Many people like to support local business by shopping at their neighborhood co-op, but they may not realize that they can take that support to the next level.

Let's help Generation Zero (GenZero) fuel their last push to secure a high quality version of the Zero Carbon Act in New Zealand! GenZero has ignited a huge movement for urgent action on climate change.

Charities are built to support communities but they are rarely offered support, themselves. That’s exactly what James Carlin set out to do when he co-founded the Bath and Northeast Somerset’s 3rd Sector Group (3SG for short). Around four years ago, after Bath lost it’s charity support agency, the founders of 3SG stepped in to quickly build an organisation that could act in its place—facilitating funding from regional sources and helping to unify charities with similar missions.

Kia ora from the whole Loomio team in Aotearoa, New Zealand. I'm Rob, co-founder and developer of the app. It’s been almost two years since our last update - which is way too long, so today I’ve got three big announcements to share with you: 1. Radical pricing for radical organizations 2. Monthly stories of incredible users. 3. Loomio 2.0 - mobile app out soon!

How do you role-model a democratic workplace? This was the question on Austen Cordasco’s mind as he set out to integrate new technology to improve decision-making within Co-operative Assistance Network Limited (CAN).

What if the purpose of companies was “to create benefit for the world and try to make it a better place”? Or if they had “employee happiness” as a key performance indicator? While it may seem far-fetched at first, we at Loomio have the privilege of serving one such company that is leading the way and showing how businesses can make a meaningful and sustainable contribution to our communities.

Score polling is a simple but expressive voting process which captures the level of preference voters have for each option in the poll.

This year Rich & Nati have been delivering collaboration workshops around Europe as The Hum, and in the downtime, Rich has been talking with people about the topics he cares about. I'm pleased to share some of that talking with you in the form of these interviews.

> The Full Circle model works on two levels: a way understand and visualise diverse kinds of leadership, and a way to map the steps of innovation and execution of projects. {% youtube "J9wnSdVlqcw" %}

Over the last few years, the New Zealand Government has been committed to seeking new ways to guarantee everyone in New Zealand a safe environment to live. The country has one of the highest reported rates of family violence and sexual violence in the developed world, so action is needed.

Hi folks, it’s Rich here, one of the Loomio co-founders. You haven’t heard from me for a while so I want to give you an update on what’s been happening this year. There’s been some incredible progress on the software, and I have a few stories to share after 9 months on the road too. 

Rich and Nati from Loomio are coming from New Zealand to join US-based team member MJ for a workshop tour across the States. We’re keen to meet with organisers who are interested in working non-hierarchically: whether they’re in cooperatives, startups, communities, collectives, NGOs or corporations.

The energy of so many people careening toward Washington D.C. was palpable on January 21st.

Chris McClimans is part of a web design co-op based in Austin, Texas that uses Loomio to have shorter meetings and make better decisions. We interviewed him at the Open Source // Open Society Conference.

For Julie DiBari, inclusive decision-making is personal as well as professional. “In 21 years in the foster care system, I was never once asked what I thought works,” she says. Now, as a consultant, Julie supports diverse stakeholders to contribute to decisions that affect them, and to collaborate on solving complex problems.

We caught up with Climate Karanga Marlborough member Leon Jay at the Open Source//Open Society Conference in Wellington. They are helping reduce climate change in Marlborough by rapidly prototyping ideas using online collaboration.

Loomio Co-op Member and Director MJ Kaplan has been all over the US in recent months, at conferences exploring impact, collaboration, the economy, the future of work, and more.

Join us for the New Zealand Premiere of an inspiring new film featuring Loomio alongside other cooperative organisations.

It’s been quite a month… Here in New Zealand we've been shaken by a 7.5 earthquake, while the world has been shaken politically.

In a self-managed company, everyone is a decision-maker. You need an effective process that enables group input while empowering individuals to act – and effective tools for running it.

Platform cooperativism is the radical idea that the internet would do more good if its major properties were democratically owned and governed.

Guardian journalist Max Opray got in touch with us last week, while researching his article Could Online Democracy Lead To Governance By Trumps and Trolls? Online interactions are notorious for being hijacked by trolls, so he wanted to hear how we handle trolls at Loomio.

# We got a shout out at the White House! Loomio has been picked as part of a suite of tools promoted by Together We Work, a campaign to empower young workers to take collective action.

Rory Ridley-Duff is a reader in cooperatives and social enterprise at Sheffield Business School, director of Social Enterprise Europe, and founder of the FairShares Association. They use Loomio to model their governance structure online, for effective, equitable stakeholding.

We open source not only our software code, but our organisation too. Our impact mission is about democratic engagement, inclusive participation, and equitable collaboration, so that's how we work as a company internally.

MJ from Loomio caught up with DJ Johnson, professor of game development at the New England Institute of Technology, about how they're bringing out the best in their faculty through more online collaboration, and fewer meetings.

Brendan Tronconi of Trusty Amigos, a Dog Walking and Pet Care co-op in New York with 9 members, shares his experience starting a worker-owned business, collaborating with people who speak different languages, and working together effectively online and offline.

SolidFund is a grassroots commonwealth fund for worker co-op members. John Atherton talks about their aspirations and operations, and how using Loomio is helping them build the worker cooperative econoomy in the UK.

The latest news from Loomio… Join us at conferences in New Zealand and Indonesia, celebrating our upgraded navigation in the app, and a range of useful how-to's.

We’re super excited about contributing to the upcoming OS//OS open source, open society conference.

There have been some exciting new UX developments at Loomio HQ! We’ve listened to our user feedback, and added a Loomio sidebar to make the most important parts of the app easier to find. You’ll notice some changes to the user interface:

Organisations that adopt Holacracy often find it’s a big upgrade to their decision-making processes. But implementing Governance meetings is only the beginning of your self-management evolution.

New Zealand recently tightened up health and safety laws. Now businesses must have practices that give their workers opportunities to participate, on an ongoing basis, in improving health and safety.

## Our New Website is Live! We brought together everything we’ve learned about communicating the value of Loomio in a simple compelling way, and combined it with visually engaging illustrations. We’ve highlighted amazing stories of people using Loomio around the world, and made help content and other resources way easier to find.

The Welsh Government’s mission is to “help improve the lives of people in Wales and make our nation a better place in which to live and work”. One of the ways the National Assembly for Wales looks at how effectively the Welsh Government is doing its job is through committees.

Nati from Loomio had the chance to interview Stacco Troncoso, strategic director of the P2P Foundation and co-founder of Guerrilla Translation, a commons-oriented translation collective who is currently crowdfunding an innovative initiative called Think Global / Print Local.

Paul Stone, Programme Leader for Open Government Data at Land Information NZ, tells the story of how a consultation to develop a framework for consistent licensing of New Zealand Government open source software has been carried out successfully in an open and transparent manner.

The last few years have been quite a journey for Loomio. This is a story about navigating the world of startup financing to find ethical investment that works for a truly mission-driven tech company with big ambitions.

So, your group is actively using Loomio for discussions and decisions. Great! Now you’re ready to optimise your collaboration experience. There are some simple things you can do to make important information clear and accessible. Here are some useful tips and tricks we’ve learned from different Loomio groups.

Did you know? It's easy to create an icon for Loomio, or any other website you use often, on your phone’s home screen. It works a lot like all your other apps – even if the service doesn't offer a native mobile app.

We’ve reached the final step in the process of switching everyone over the the new and improved Loomio interface.

Since Loomio first launched, the team has been fielding requests from clients to help make the tool and collaborative processes work for them. In response, Loomio has offered consulting Services that discover needs, identify changes to work processes, and coach key team members to understand the magic and the practicality of Loomio’s mission: “Enabling everyone to have a say in decisions that affect them”.

It’s been devastating to watch as the conflict in Syria has escalated into the biggest humanitarian crisis of our generation. For those of us far away from the area, it’s frustrating not knowing how we can help. So when Rich from Loomio stumbled across an U.S. American activist working with Syrian refugees in Turkey, he reached out.

Alanna from Loomio met Vica Rogers in London, to learn more about her world of citizen education and activism. Vica was involved in the Occupy movement in the UK, and has continued working on related issues ever since. We took some time in Vica's back garden to hear about how group collaboration is helping citizens in her community organise around the issue of debt.

2016 is shaping up to be an exciting year for Loomio. Here are some highlights from the first few months.

Alanna from Loomio met Simon Sarazin in Berlin at “Capital for the Commons”, where Simon was presenting his work on uCoin, a project seeking to implement universal basic income through cryptocurrency. He took a break from hacking on economics to tell us how collaborative governance has transformed his co-working space in Lille, France.

Alanna from Loomio met Till Wolfer at POC21, a 6 week innovation camp in France focused on open source hardware for sustainability. Till was lending his expertise as an architect and designer. He stepped out for a moment to share how he collaborates back home with a 200-person artist collective occupying 12 buildings in Hamburg, Germany.

Alanna from Loomio met up with Michel Bauwens in Berlin, while both were participating in a conference about Capital for the Commons. They managed to slip out for a few minutes so Michel could tell Alanna about his experience using Loomio with the P2P Foundation, which he founded.

We’ve been having a Mad Science kind of summer. One of our most exciting experiments has just bubbled out of the lab and into the wild. Announcing… EMOJIS!

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:

It’s the first day of Spring in Aotearoa New Zealand, and it certainly feels like it. We’re now halfway between the end of the crowdfunding campaign and the pre-release date for Loomio 1.0. It’s been hard work, but immensely rewarding. We’re really motivated by all your support. All up, we’re cranking along and things are on track for November!

We’ve released some exciting new ways to see what’s most important to you on Loomio!

The Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) in New York is an annual gathering of people from around the world working towards a free and open internet. In June this year, we were lucky enough to be invited to present Loomio at PDF, in a session on “The Future of the Public Internet”. Ben Knight talks about his experience speaking at this amazing event.

Greetings friends, wow another month has flown past so it is time for another update from Loomio HQ.

## Released in the last few weeks ### Import Contacts

It’s Matariki here in Aotearoa New Zealand and we’re really feeling the winter solstice vibe at Loomio HQ – feels like it’s getting brighter every day!

You spoke, we listened – “editing comments” has been the most upvoted card since we opened up the public Roadmap.

Right from the start, Loomio has been a community-driven project. From day one, we’ve had real people using Loomio to make real decisions, and real world feedback from users has directed development all along.

Yesterday we released a whole new system for managing the privacy of your groups. Now when you start a new Loomio group, you’ll get the following options:

## Word of the Year: Gratitude It’s still a bit unreal – over 1600 people contributed over $125,000 to make the Loomio crowdfunding campaign a massive success. Because the “give now” button remains live, amazingly even now donations keep coming in. It was a huge validation of what we’ve believed all along: the world wants Loomio!

After an incredible couple of days, the target is within reach! It’s truly overwhelming to see so many generous people getting behind this project, reminding us that we’re not crazy to pour our lives into it for the last 18 months 🙂

After an amazing week, the $100K target is now well within reach! We’re blown away by our team of more than 850 people supporting us to make this project happen!

Jacqui Graham is a social entrepreneur who believes in using her skills for social good. Driven to improve the lives of New Zealanders who experience mental illness, Jacqui founded and serves as joint chief executive of the Wise Group, one of the largest non-government providers of community-based mental health and wellness services in New Zealand. The organisation employs over one thousand staff and is regarded as one of the most sophisticated and innovative NGO service providers. Jacqui sat down with us to discuss the importance of staff engagement and why she decided to use Loomio.

Sunday was the official mid-point of our crowdfunding campaign. Amazingly enough, on that exact day we made it to a major milestone, 50% of our $100k target!

## people doing awesome stuff with technology, democracy, and collaboration. Inspiring Disruptors are at the vanguard, maximising both autonomy and collaboration. They skillfully bring out the best of technology and the best of people, forging ahead into a new kind of society. We’re following in their footsteps, building tools for a new way of organising, communicating, and cooperating.

Amanda Palmer is a musician who has built a hugely successful career based on the gift economy. When you go to her webstore, you see that paying for her music is voluntary: if you’re broke – take it. if you love it, come back and kick in later when you have the money.

It's been an amazing two weeks, with support coming from all corners of the globe. Thanks to the generosity of more than 600 wonderful people, we're nearly halfway to our goal with 3 weeks to go. It feels like we've got a real shot at making this happen, but we're going to need some help to get there.

The process of making a decision that Loomio enables is actually really simple: bring people together to talk things through, share ideas, address any concerns, and determine a clear course of action that works for everyone.

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.

We've always had a commitment to working with our community to steer the development of this project. The strongest message they've given us so far is ‘Loomio should be available in as many languages as possible'. So we prioritised translation, and within a few weeks a whole squad of volunteers had turned up to help out. Since that decision to prioritise translation five months ago, Loomio is now available in ten languages, with plenty more in the works.

In a world fraught with violence, Nonviolent Communication (NVC) aims to transform how people communicate with each other, and is underpinned by an assumption that human beings are compassionate by nature. NVC was developed in the 1960s by Marshall Rosenberg, who wanted to understand how people can stay compassionate in the face of extreme circumstances and violence. The NVC community is active in over 65 countries around the globe. One of the many international conferences and trainings for people wanting to learn and practice NVC takes place in India each year. When Emma Collins, a Compassionate Communication Trainer, approached Loomio to discuss how our platform could support their project, their aims and intentions resonated strongly with us.

A comic-book whizz, a web developer, a chiropractor, a film-maker, several curators and a grocery store co-op owner: What do these people have in common? Well, they are some of the busiest people on Loomio: and they belong to the Adobe Books and Arts Cooperative. Loomio loves this group of people who have come together as a co-op to protect a well-loved community space, Adobe Books, in San Francisco’s Mission district. As Brett Lockspeiser explains, > “Adobe Books has been in San Francisco for 25 years. For 24 of those years it was a sole proprietorship, mostly run by Andrew McKinley, who owned the shop. Unfortunately, the business of selling his books has become harder and harder…combine that with San Francisco which is currently gentrifying at an obscene rate. In 16th Street of the Mission the rents were doubling”.

Those of us working on Loomio all have big dreams for what we’d like the software to look like in future. We’re continuously inundated with helpful feedback, awesome ideas and suggestions for how Loomio could be improved.

Richard Telford heard about Loomio from a friend at a local food swap in Seymor, Australia. His friend happened to be Carl Scarse, who several weeks ago posted this on our Facebook page: Carl and Richard know each other through the Intentional Community, Commonground, where Richard lived for about five years. The community began in the 80s in response to a need for support, resources and networks for social change activists. Today, Commonground is a co-operatively living community of activists and people concerned with living lightly on the earth, sharing resources, and supporting social change groups. Rather cool.

Rich has been described as “an engineer turned artist turned activist” and is one of the original forces behind Loomio. He recently gave a talk on Internet and Identity at Victoria University, so with that juicy bit of content we thought he was the perfect and timely opener for our spotlight on our people. Name: Richard D. Bartlett Age: 28, which is like a granddad in internet time Title: Director of Autonomy (Richard assures us this is true and not just made up for the interview) Team: Richard jumps between the code and community team ## Why did you get involved with Loomio? I have a background in open source hardware (as Rich Decibels) and creative community organising (with Concerned Citizens Collective). I got swept up in the Occupy movement when it arrived in Wellington in 2011. I’ve always been pretty concerned about the so-called ‘wicked problems’ facing society: runaway climate change, resource depletion, ecosystem collapse, and the pervading sense of alienation throughout society… This Occupy experience totally transformed my view on all that – it was the first time I’ve ever really had any hope for the future. My participation in that movement lead me to believe that there’s no problem that can’t be solved by an engaged community of empathetic equals. Occupy totally changed my life, and my hope is that Loomio can make that transformative experience much more sustainable, and accessible to millions of other people.

Thanks to everyone for making our launch party totally magical! Here's a video of Rich and Vivien presenting some of the Loomio story, supported by an international cast of contributors: Loomio launch party - timeline presentation from Enspiral on Vimeo. Click through for some magnificent party photos from Mark Russell ([email protected]):

We are excited to announce that after 15 months of hard work, we’re finally launching publicly! The team has put a huge amount of time, passion and effort into this moment. But more importantly, we have been supported by an incredible community of courageous early-adopting users – all kinds of inspiring groups doing amazing things all over the world.

We're currently in the process of figuring out what sort of legal structure the Loomio organisation should take, whether that be a not-for-profit company or a worker co-op, or something else.

Each group in the Enspiral umbrella is encouraged to write a ‘company update' every couple of months to keep the whole network up to speed with all the projects going on. This is our second update, it is an attempt to capture a few of the huge number of exciting occurrences in the last two months in LoomioLand:

“Emergence” is an ugly buzzword for a truly magnificent concept that is central to our vision for Loomio. Jeffrey Goldstein defines emergence as “the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems”. Emergent phenomena tend to arise when many individuals interact with their environment, without central control, in ways that are governed by simple rules. Emergence in Nature There are lots of striking examples of emergence in nature.

Our campaign on PledgeMe has reached its goal, and more! We can't thank our generous supporters enough for throwing their inspiring energy and hard-won cash behind this project.

I think productive, inclusive human organisations and productive, inclusive human discussions can be typified as being “organic”, and any systems we build to try to coordinate & organise these organisations and discussions can be thought of as “inorganic”. So when we have a meeting with lots of good free-flowing discussion, that's what I mean by ‘organic'. In order to share the value of that meeting though, it needs to be distilled into minutes or notes: I would say these are ‘inorganic'. This is the crux of the organic/inorganic problem: the notes or minutes are never going to catch all the details and the subtlety of the actual meeting: for it be of any value, it has to be relatively brief, digestible, shareable. Groups and sub-groups are another version of the problem: the organic reality is that most humans are involved to different degrees in different overlapping sub-groups. The problem is, in order to get anything done you need to impose some kind of inorganic structure, but there is no perfect way to compartmentalise people into defined roles & responsibilities.  The problem we are grappling with is how to make a system that simultaneously captures the subtlety of reality while effectively summarising these subtleties into digestible chunks.   The answer is… fractals! My intuition says that the ideal Loomio will have all kinds of fractal characteristics. By fractal I mean self-similar at different scales, zoomable to infinite depth, recognisably beautiful. 

Hi! I'm Rich. I'm one of the people working on Loomio. I come to the project from an arts/activist background, so I have some pretty strong feelings on culture, community, and business. One of the inspiring things about the team we've got is that there is room for people with different ideas. There are people like me who have a knee-jerk reaction to business (eww yuck boo), but there are plenty of others with a more mature and experienced view that are really excited about the potential for the tool to help businesses work more efficiently and more democratically.  In preparation for last week's meeting about the Loomio business structure, Jon, Ben and I had an email conversation. Don't take it too seriously, it's just an off-the-cuff statement of my position regarding Loomio and the Tyranny of Money. It was intended to be read by an audience of two friends, but I figure it couldn't really hurt for anyone else that wants to get a better idea of how I feel about the project.