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. 

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.

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 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.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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”.