Loomio actually looks OK and works quite well on my mobile phone.... Never thought to use it on there before but was pleasantly surprised. Make a bookmark shortcut on my homescreen and for all intents and purposes it's functioning just like a mobile app would.

@alannakrause yeah I use it on my iphone a bit too

I'm planning to be in the office from 11 today.

Loomio has made its first financial contribution to the Enspiral Foundation - $257! Feels good.

Heroku's dirty secret

@simontegg whats the HSF for Loomio?

Running a simulation like they do for RapGenius is on the todo list. Might get to this next week

For some reason I don't have access to Loomio's github repo since it moved from the enspiral to the loomio organization.

Can a repo owner fix this?

PS: This would better fit in the "Code" subgroup, so maybe we need a "~~ Wall ~~" per subgroup…

@jonlemmon

Hello community!

There's a nice article published this morning the Capital Times about the work Loomio is doing to make citizen participation in local governance easier in Wellington.

Any help sharing this link ( http://www.capitaltimes.co.nz/Online-on-booze ) around and directing interested people to www.loomio.org/collaborate would be much appreciated!

PS the work @johnirving did on the Facebook link previews for Loomio are thoroughly awesome!

It'll make it way easier to push our shameless loomio.org/collaborate mobile billboard through the friendly neighbourhood Facebook shopping mall :)

Are we having all hands this friday? some people will be away for easter... I'll be here (I usually fail to even remember holidays exist) but what about everyone else?

Everyone please share off this post on facebook to spread the captimes article around facebook. Thanks!

Interesting: Reasonwell

Constructive Online Debate

Reasonwell is a new kind of online opinion platform that structures debate in a constructive way; it facilitates collaborative argument mapping:
Each argument is made up of claims.
Each claim is stated as a simple proposition with which you can agree or disagree.
Reasons to agree or disagree are given as arguments, which you can accept or reject.
The best arguments are voted to the top.
The argument map’s branching structure focuses attention on specific claims and arguments, eliminates off-topic noise, and allows drilling down into details. Your opinions on every element of the debate are visible to others, and nobody can edit them for you. Others can propose edits to refine claims and arguments, but you choose which changes you accept. The result is a collaboratively built argument map drawing from the crowd's breadth of perspectives, with concise arguments linking to evidence on points of detail.

Marco Arment reflects on Google Reader shutting down, owning one's own data, cloud services, etc.

This is pretty cool... Joseph Gordon Levitt launching a collaborative community driven tv show called Hit Record

This is an amazing article written in 1970 but still highly relevant. THE TYRANNY of STRUCTURELESSNESS

It's all about how no matter what you might think, all groups inherently have structure. But the less explicit the structure is, the more likely it will lead to elitist factions and marginalization.

It concludes by saying there are 7 elements for truly democratic structuring:
1. delegation
2. accountability/responsibility
3. distribution of authority
4. rotation of tasks
5. rational allocation of tasks
6. diffusion of information
7. equal access to resources

@alannakrause check out the comments on this FB post for the critique of that article. TLDR: 'you rotten marxists have been trotting that article out for 40 years to justify your outdated statist models'.

Vinay's political evolution link

@richarddbartlett, I wasn't sure when you were changing it. But now I am acclimatized, I like the bs2 black header better than the gradient. I would however at some stage, when we have our functionality stabiliized, like to have our own look menus. A little bit less out of the bootstrap mold, @kellycheesman would you agree?

@alannakrause Thanks — enjoyed re-reading that article.

Hello wall, I'm a little lost... can you point me towards the feedback / suggestions room...?

Hello Malcolm, welcome, make yourself at home :)

The structure of this group is still a work in progress, but generally speaking the best place for specific feature feedback is in the Features subgroup.

If in doubt, you can always start a new discussion here in the main group.

Pay-what-you-like models for apps link

Some crazy stuff going on in Hungary right now. Wishing the best for all our Hungarian users...

http://www.newstatesman.com/austerity-and-its-discontents/2013/04/hungary-no-longer-democracy

A less current but still really interesting article about the political situation in Hungary

"Until recently, Hungary was deeply divided.

Half of the population believed that only the socialists could be trusted to run the country's affairs competently. They despised the current Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, as a populist demagogue.

Meanwhile, the other half saw Mr Orban as a saviour from the corruption of the socialists, who were seen as a bunch of detestable self-serving ex-communist apparatchiks in new suits.

But now the country is becoming more united again - united in despair at the entire political class."

Just ordered this book Tempo from fishpond (not amazon)

A discussion on Loomio vs A Mailing list

Good spotting @simontegg.

If there were a subgroup in the Loomio Community for Loomio Admins, I would invite the admin of that group to it. It would be a great place to start having conversations about how some groups are structuring themselves with Loomio. e.g. it might be useful for the Chakra Project to set up a broad public group to replace their mailing list, and a narrower private/closed-access sub-group for decision-making.

I think an Admins subgroup could be a great idea... they have it on the yammer customer network, for example, and discuss things only relevant to admins. Might not be needed until we have a more fully featured set of admins tools though.

I was thinking of it more as a place for sharing best practices for the 'cultural technology' aspects of Loomio.

Went to the Startup Compass (the ones who created the startup genome project) website to see if Startup Genome Project was capitalized, and got utterly lost in their blog ... careful @simontegg and @richarddbartlett tharr be dragons!

Huh, it is capitalized

Jon Siddall who I met last year when he had been in NZ working on some social enterprise sector development stuff is in Wellington this week presenting at the Philanthropy NZ conference. His area of expertise is Venture Philanthropy - in particular getting ventures ready for sizable investment. He has been back in the UK doing a One Planet MBA at Exeter Business School. I told him about you guys last year and he was pretty interested. Let me know if any of you would like an introduction!

uk.linkedin.com/in/siddalljon

@benjaminknight @vivienmaidaborn what do you think about meeting Chloe's contact?

Thanks for the offer @chloewaretini! Do you know if Jon is going to be around on Thursday or Friday? An email intro would be great

@benjaminknight I'll send the introduction this afternoon and you can take it from there :-)

A small but exciting piece of news: this community has grown so much that I had to bump up the "max members" size for this group!

Is there any discussion about making the Loomio API open or making it embeddable in another site? I would imagine there are some groups who would be interested in using Loomio but would rather keep people on their site rather than sending them somewhere else.

I apologize if this issue has already been addressed--I haven't been able to find it in the various discussion in the community but that doesn't mean it hasn't been discussed.

Hi @jeffswift, the question of an API has come up a few times. As far as I understand it, it is not a top priority yet, but there is a pretty strong sense that it is going to be a very important part of Loomio's large-scale adoption.

My technical knowledge is pretty threadbare on this topic but to the best of my knowledge, good object-oriented coding practices are preparing the ground for an API in the future. So progress is being made, even if no one is explicitly thinking 'I'm building the Loomio API'. Is that fair @jonlemmon?

p.s. it would probably be good to take this conversation to the Code group if we want to get technical :)

@jeffswift yes, transitioning Loomio to using an API that anyone can access is definitely on the cards.

Embedding in other websites... we talked about this a while ago, but I think there are some other priorities which are going to have to get sorted out first (e.g. making the site faster, making the UI responsive). Check out this trello board to see what's on our radar for the next few months (specifically, have a look at the By June column).

You can't start the revolution from the Country Club

Saw readrboard in the wild for the first time today. Interesting! Essentially lets you make one word comments on individual words or sentences in text on the web. Something to consider for our "comment on comments" need?

It looks like it hasn't been announced yet, but I just noticed that Trello has released their "business class" package, basically just extra organisational features for Trello targeted toward larger businesses. Really interesting to see the feature set they provide and their pricing structure:

https://trello.com/business-class

The features are stuff that really only businesses would need, and it's also quite cheap (and isn't dependent on the number of users).

@benjaminknightloom @vivienmaidabornloo @simontegg

Some GK Chesterton, from A Miscellany of Men, 1912, that resonated for me:

Self-government arose among men (probably among the primitive men, certainly among the ancients) out of an idea which seems now too simple to be understood. The notion of self-government was not (as many modern friends and foes of it seem to think) the notion that the ordinary citizen is to be consulted as one consults an Encyclopaedia. He is not there to be asked a lot of fancy questions, to see how he answers them. He and his fellows are to be, within reasonable human limits, masters of their own lives. They shall decide whether they shall be men of the oar or the wheel, of the spade or the spear. The men of the valley shall settle whether the valley shall be devastated for coal or covered with corn and vines; the men of the town shall decide whether it shall be hoary with thatches or splendid with spires. Of their own nature and instinct they shall gather under a patriarchal chief or debate in a political market-place. And in case the word "man" be misunderstood, I may remark that in this moral atmosphere, this original soul of self-government, the women always have quite as much influence as the men. But in modern England neither the men nor the women have any influence at all. In this primary matter, the moulding of the landscape, the creation of a mode of life, the people are utterly impotent. They stand and stare at imperial and economic processes going on, as they might stare at the Lord Mayor's Show.
Round about where I live, for instance, two changes are taking place which really affect the land and all things that live on it, whether for good or evil. The first is that the urban civilisation (or whatever it is) is advancing; that the clerks come out in black swarms and the villas advance in red battalions. The other is that the vast estates into which England has long been divided are passing out of the hands of the English gentry into the hands of men who are always upstarts and often actually foreigners.
Now, these are just the sort of things with which self-government was really supposed to grapple. People were supposed to be able to indicate whether they wished to live in town or country, to be represented by a gentleman or a cad. I do not presume to prejudge their decision; perhaps they would prefer the cad; perhaps he is really preferable. I say that the filling of a man's native sky with smoke or the selling of his roof over his head illustrate the sort of things he ought to have some say in, if he is supposed to be governing himself. But owing to the strange trend of recent society, these enormous earthquakes he has to pass over and treat as private trivialities. In theory the building of a villa is as incidental as the buying of a hat. In reality it is as if all Lancashire were laid waste for deer forests; or as if all Belgium were flooded by the sea. In theory the sale of a squire's land to a moneylender is a minor and exceptional necessity. In reality it is a thing like a German invasion. Sometimes it is a German invasion.
Upon this helpless populace, gazing at these prodigies and fates, comes round about every five years a thing called a General Election. It is believed by antiquarians to be the remains of some system of self-government; but it consists solely in asking the citizen questions about everything except what he understands.

Blog post written by Jason Kottke after "The Wisdom of Crowds" was published in 2004...

The wisdom of crowds you say? As Surowiecki explains, yes, but only under the right conditions. In order for a crowd to be smart, he says it needs to satisfy four conditions:

1. Diversity. A group with many different points of view will make better decisions than one where everyone knows the same information. Think multi-disciplinary teams building Web sites...programmers, designers, biz dev, QA folks, end users, and copywriters all contributing to the process, each has a unique view of what the final product should be. Contrast that with, say, the President of the US and his Cabinet.

2. Independence. "People's opinions are not determined by those around them." AKA, avoiding the circular mill problem.

3. Decentralization. "Power does not fully reside in one central location, and many of the important decisions are made by individuals based on their own local and specific knowledge rather than by an omniscient or farseeing planner." The open source software development process is an example of effect decentralization in action.

4. Aggregation. You need some way of determining the group's answer from the individual responses of its members. The evils of design by committee are due in part to the lack of correct aggregation of information. A better way to harness a group for the purpose of designing something would be for the group's opinion to be aggregated by an individual who is skilled at incorporating differing viewpoints into a single shared vision and for everyone in the group to be aware of that process (good managers do this). Aggregation seems to be the most tricky of the four conditions to satisfy because there are so many different ways to aggregate opinion, not all of which are right for a given situation.

Satisfy those four conditions and you've hopefully cancelled out some of the error involved in all decision making.

Here is a governance model for an open-source "meritocratic, consensus-based community project." Mojito

@simontegg Very interesting overall! I especially like the section 5.3 on the different type of approvals. Offering the possibility to make a proposal with specific approval patterns/rules (majority approval, unanimous consensus etc…) would be very valuable I think.

Very cool @simontegg. Do you want to reach out to them and invite them into Loomio? Looks like they would have a lot to teach us.

After the meeting the other day, I am thinking an open source community institution developing a repository of best-practice governance models, constitutions, privacy policies, CLAs etc etc would be really valuable. This is beyond the scope of even the FSF or OSI because it would be useful to anyone creating a social enterprise in any field. Community.net.nz (an advice service for people wanting to set up not-for-profits) is one example of what this could like like. Law is code!

Dave Pollard shares some insights on the history of the words democracy and consensus from the latest book by US anthropologist David Graeber:
"[Consensus] requires the ability to listen well enough to understand perspectives that are fundamentally different from one’s own, and then try to find pragmatic common ground without attempting to convert one’s interlocutors completely to one’s own perspective. It means viewing democracy as common problem solving among those who respect the fact they will always have, like all humans, somewhat incommensurable points of view.”
http://howtosavetheworld.ca/2013/04/29/the-democracy-project/

Our colleague Wayne Mulligan mentioned Loomio in an email out to people and businesses who have supported him and his thinking as he makes his way to the USNZ business partnerships meeting in Washington DC. This is what he said...
"Kia ora, I have been asked to speak at a gathering of USA -NZ business and political leaders in Washington DC in mid May 2013.

I am extremely honoured and proud. For me working with leaders and people committed to doing the right things in business, for community and the right outcome for the environment is refreshing and energising.

You have received this because I acknowledge you and your influence.

We are not farmers, harvesters or traders.

We are instead framers; we imagine, we shape and we drive change, and we foremost value New Zealand's bio-diversity, NZ communities; NZ technology and science; and smart business partners.

Thank you.

I have chosen lyrics of a song from the 80s' Thunder Zone by Tina Turner, which sums up for me the current NZ business mindset "we do not need another hero" Let's replace hero with cow. I think the cow-hero relationship sums up the NZ parody....

Thank you whanau, friends and the following businesses: HoneyLab and Kanu; Anagenix; Loomio; Enspiral; Rima Group - Green Tech Village; Wakatu-Kono; iwiinvestor- TMG; Wi Pere; NRAIT; GibsonSheet; Udynamics; AbacusBio; Rydges; HarrisonGrierson; Poutama; Nga Mahanga - Marae Ora; Hikurangi Foundation; Fuel 5; GlobalHort; Kerasi; Foundation Trustee; Maori Tourism; and Novus- Stratum.

The debate over the supercity plan would be so much more engaging on Loomio... is this a possible target for our local councils strategy? @vivienmaidabornloo @benjaminknightloom

So much to like about that email @vivienmaidabornloo

'Why Medium Notes Are Different and How to Use Them Well' https://medium.com/about/5972c72b18f2 — interesting upgrade to blog comments

@matthewbartlett interresting. With this and readerboard that Alanna introduced just a few posts earlier in this thread, it's looking like in-context commenting (if I can call it so) is making its way.

But for some reason I'm not 100% sold that it should replace traditional comment systems (though it's a nice addition for very concise, contextualized comments)…

Coopoly - the game of cooperatives:
http://store.toolboxfored.org/games/

Co-opoly is a well thought out board game @Stypey, I have one and am keen to play the game in Wellington.

@ramseymargolis sweet. We should host a co-opoly night at Enspiral!

@benjaminknightloom @alannakrause @richarddbartlett do you think loomio could be interested in this? i can look in to the selection process and application and let you know, sounds really interesting and they give you the opportunity to live in Chile. I've made a bit of research about people currently doing it and they seem to be very successful
http://startupchile.org/about/the-program/

A nice bit of press on Loomio! Occupy Democracy: Loomio attempts to re-invent group decision-making… as a co-op

Waahhh… I've just discovered FrontlineSMS. Ok their website is ugly but what they're doing really is awesome.

Probably something that it would make sense to use once we have the web/smartphones app thriving, and that we want to bring good decision making practices to people who don't have access to internet / or who engage more easily with cellphones than any more recent/sophisticated technologies.

I'm so happy when is see use of open-source software that has really important social impact like that!

Wowww that rules @nicolaswormser

Read Here! http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vanessa-van-edwards/start-up-chile_b_3225480.html
@richarddbartlett @benjaminknightloom @alannakrause

Great article thanks @noelia. Personally, the idea of going through an entrepreneurship training program sounds pretty unappealing. I'm sure there's a lot of value there, but it's not my thing. If there's a volunteer that wants to go, then we talk about how it fits in with strategic priorities.

@richarddbartlett right, i guess i was more amused about the idea of going to S.A working on the ground with groups facilitating and teaching them about Loomio, thats how i came across with this startup Chile "thing", but maybe isn't something you guys are interested in now, do you think that the idea of going there is still crazy? i mentioned it to @alannakrause too but didn't really talk through, would you guys support me if I'll do it? (just go to S.A not startup-Chile)

Why do co-operatives
fail as co-operatives?

Excerpt

Co-operative Difference and Advantage
The key to the formation and the ongoing development and success of any co-operative is understanding, accepting and practicing the co-operative difference and advantage. It is the recognition that there is a co-operative difference - that the structure of a co-operative is unique and different from private and public business enterprises. In accepting the co-operative difference, it logically follows that this difference creates a
co-operative advantage.

The Co-operative Difference and Advantage has five interdependent dimensions:
• A clear philosophy of co-operation.
• A governance practice that reflects and reinforces co-operation.
• A management practice that reflects and reinforces co-operation.
• An ongoing co-operative renewal program.
• An ongoing member education program.
• An ongoing member participation program.

On Citizenship in Open-source software development:
How GitHub can revolutionize the field simply by empowering the users inside the repositories they contribute

TL;DR: By giving an actual social status to the people contributing to a repository, GitHub would solve the problem of zombie-projects with a scattered community. By allowing these citizens to actually collaborate with each other, instead of just with the owner, repositories will live as long as the community exists, completely on auto-pilot.

Some food for thought @jonlemmon @richarddbartlett @robertguthrie

@alannakrause yeah about a year ago I was thinking about this exact feature for Loomio. That pull-requests would automatically be merged based on how the Loomio community voted on them. In retrospect, it seems a bit unnecessary at the stage we're in.

Also, the types of projects he's talking about are small OS projects that one individual might maintain in their spare time. So they are much more prone to the issue he's talking about than we are. It's totally a good idea though. Would love to see that happen.

Anyone else keeping up with what they're doing with Our Capital Voice? They've now launched a discussion forum around the city budget. From what I can see, they've posted pre-formulated proposals and people can leave comments. It seems to be attracting low engagement. The topics are quite technical and are presented as foregone conclusions. Interesting to compare to a genuine public collaboration as we'd do with Loomio. Very different approach. @vivienmaidabornloo @benjaminknightloom @chelsearobinson

I am loving the energy in this group - feels like how I imagined the Loomio community would be

This came from Harry Silver
"Perhaps most significantly, focus in the swarm is always on what everybody can do, and never what people cannot or must do."
http://falkvinge.net/2013/02/14/swarmwise-the-tactical-manual-to-changing-the-world-chapter-one/

@alannakrause I'm having coffee with Janette (mother of Our Capital Voice) tomorrow so I can pick her brains. Send me any questions you want me to ask her - I'm planning on inviting her over some time for a bigger conversation - this is just step one :)

'Google is not “evil”. Google is too big to be evil. At its worst, Google is banal.' http://mwunsch.tumblr.com/post/50588412660/on-google

Great news everyone!

Loomio was selected to present at the World Forum for Democracy in Strasbourg in November, alongside some truly amazing projects from all over the place.

Now we need to figure out how to make the most out of having people over there.

Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self-Interest

Stewardship was provocative, even revolutionary, when it was first published in 1993, and it remains every bit as relevant and radical today. Most organizations still rely on patriarchy and hierarchy as their core form of governance, stifling initiative and spirit and alienating people from the work they do. Peter Block asserts that a fundamental shift in how we distribute power, privilege, and the control of money can transform every part of an organization for the better, and he examines the nitty-gritty of implementing these reforms.

Looks interesting...

I love the new formatted emails. Thanks, @johnirving ?

Yep, that'd be me. Next stop:

¡¡¡ EMOTICONS!!!

I love them too!!!!

This evening I set up a Student Council with Loomio, at an intermediate school in Palmerston North. It's made up of 11 and 12 year-olds.

Within fifteen minutes of setting up the group, five kids had joined, and one started a discussion about the prices at the school tuck shop.

Everyday democracy!

I mentioned to Jesse in my phone interview giving props to Loomio in a critique of the Diaspora project on my blog. Here's the article: http://www.coactivate.org/projects/disintermedia/blog/2012/08/29/join-the-diaspora-3-years-on/

BetterMeans is a free code project management tool, a fork of RedMine with a strong focus on democratic development. Their website also has this well thought-out Open Enterprise Governance Model:
http://bettermeans.com/front/open_enterprise_governance_model.html

@benjaminknightloom
now we've got the schools, can we start planning our own Loomio School? I really want to re-jig our education system... little golden castles in the air pffff

I for one find this quite pleasing.

New feature in the policy discussion part of the Greens' website:

The policy committee is experimenting with the new consensus decision tool. Please click on one of the four small round coloured buttons to the right to indicate how you feel about the Issue Group's recommendation and use the comment section below to elaborate on your reasons. You may return and change your selection at any time while the document is open for submissions and as you take part in the discussion.

If by concerning you mean reaffirming and awesome!

I love the idea that other people in Wellington have been inspired to implement something along similar lines. The only reason it would be worrying is if someone was looking to commercialise it, which seems extremely unlikely.

This looks much more like a purpose-built adaptation, which is great - open-source thinking in action!

I think we might know some of the people involved in developing this (those symbols are the exact ones our friend designed for Occupy Wellington), so the next step is to talk to them about sharing learning and seeing where we can help each other out.

@matthewbartlett , did you look at the nice little Loomio article on a Russian tech blog here?

Here's a rough translation:

With the help of the platform is made possible Loomio brainstorming, finding and making decisions that would please all parties. The platform is suitable for any group of people, and in order to make decisions with it, not necessarily to gather in the same room.

Agree Matt's find is awesome - don't find it concerning at all! Would be cool to collaborate with them a bit and share learnings.

... well because...

On a lighter note, this could be where the Edinburgh council heard about Loomio from?? Came through on Google Alerts.

www.govloop.com/profiles/blogs/loomio
Loomio - GovLoop - Knowledge Network for Government
Loomio looks like a neat tool for groups to discuss a topic and to come to decisions. Often online discussions just go nowhere and don't result in specific act…

I wanna give a shout-out to the devs, the comms people, and all the testers: the new group request, setup, and invitation process got merged last night and should be deployed any minute now.

We're talking 4,500 new lines of code across 300 files - a totally gargantuan effort that's going to make it way easier for people to get started with Loomio.

Manifesto for agile software development

Principles behind Agile

Some really interesting ideas on Reinventing Governance, in a recorded 8-way google hangout that happened yesterday.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rmJA8EPySNs#!

We've had contact with two of these people already, and I'm feeling like we should make contact with all of the others in the near future :)

Thanks @micahdaigle for the heads up!

@Matthew haven't the Young Greens been using Loomio for national decision-making? Seems like the policy web team are just picking up ideas from that. What you need to do now is convince the Greens to host their own instance of Loomio, and become contributors to the project, rather than reinventing the wheel.

Here's the TL;DR on the Open Enterprise Governance Model:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=IdcAxGGRafc

This may become more relevant later, if you start to attract lots of remote contributors, especially if some of their are running their own instances of the software instead of using your hosting.

Nice little article about resurgence of worker-coops in parts of New York after Hurricane Sandy : http://occupywallstreet.net/story/occupy-sandy-funds-growth-worker-owned-co-ops

The Engineering Director of Google.org (who have a Loomio group!), New Zealand born Craig Nevill-Manning, will be joining a nation-wide Google Hangout of eager Startup Weekend entrepreneurs on 19th June for an interactive seminar about how to use technology for social impact. The event is free.

There's going to be a venue for people to get together in Wellington at BizDojo. You can also host a venue in your town if you're somewhere else, or join in as an individual via google hangout.

Check out this blog post for details and a link to the eventbrite page to sign up if you're in Wellington.

@benjaminknightloom @richarddbartlett @jonlemmon @vivienmaidabornloo @aaronthornton @johnirving @simontegg @jessedoud @matthewbartlett

I'm not going to make it into the office this morning, but would love to hear how Russel Norman's visit went at some point.

Loomio tutorial video en Espanol: https://vimeo.com/67765444

Thanks @rodolfo and @noelia!

What do you think?

Bonita voz ! just a comment, español instead of espanol and in Sapin we call it "gráfico de porciones" rather than "gráfico pastel" but honestly I rather like it more this last one.

The spanish tutorial video needs improvements but can be used in the meantime.

Still exist content in english in the help page, for example:

https://www.loomio.org/assets/how-it-works-overview-big-00e303dc848a5c0afac16118fda4fea0.jpg

Could be usefull have this screenshots in spanish.

@rodolfo it's likely that the layout of the app will change substantially in the next couple of months, so there will need to be a whole new tutorial video anyway.

This time we can design the film with translation in mind from the beginning: e.g. if I'm going to narrate again I will... speak... slower... next... time... :)

Maybe a silly question... how do you embed a picture in a comment?

@richarddbartlett Ok, thank you. : )

@kristianbritopasin not a silly question! Took me ages to figure it out myself... The syntax is:

woops hard to do that without it interpreting it wrong... it's ! then open and close square brackets, then the image url in round brackets

Thx @alannakrause ! Got it!

Like this @kristianbritopasin:

![](http://path.to/image.jpg)

Loomio is currently using 'Markdown' to do text formatting (and image embedding), which is a great system for geeks like me but it is not very user friendly! You can switch Markdown on with the little grey icon below the comment box:

Find out more about using Markdown here.

I've had a bit of feedback recently that the Loomio server is not holding up to the level of use it's getting, and people are losing work. I've noticed performance is a bit sluggish today.

@richarddbartlett i actually checked the info there before on the link you gave but didn´t see info abou images. I see them now. I guess I didn´t pay attention enough. Thx!

Thanks heaps for the feedback @strypey, sorry for the lag in responding - can you email me any more details about how people lost work? ben@loomio.org

New York state has just tried using GitHub to get public input on policy - here

Clay Shirky will be happy :)

@benjaminknightloom have passed on the request for details to the group members concerned. I’ve been finding page loads are slower than they used to be, but not terminally slow.

Are you using a proxy to prevent users directly querying your database? Both Indymedia CMS and CoActivate sysadmins found server load reduced considerably when they set up a proxy to serve pre-formatted pages to users, and let the database push a new version of a page to the proxy, when its contents changes.

Thanks heaps for that @strypey! Hey @jonlemmon and/or @robertguthrie, can you shed any light on Strypey's question?

@strypey if I'm hearing you right, what you're talking about is basically a form of caching. We have someone working on caching right this moment, so hopefully you'll feel a boost in performance within the next couple of weeks. =)

A beautiful act of digital disobedience: World Cup website hacked to show the protests in Brazil.

@jonlemmon @richarddbartlett

@kellycheesman has done an amazing piece of work giving Loomio a total style overhaul. Take a look and join the [Design group](https://www.loomio.org/groups/2970 if you want to weigh in.

Have you guys considered making the Wall a feature? Combined with forking, this could form the core of new form of Loomio UX.
[user story] As a user, I want to make comments in an ongoing discussion, and to fork any comment which seems to need a discussion of its own into a separate thread, to reduce unmanageable proliferation of discussions, and give the group discourse an ongoing centre.

what a shame this site is only accessible in spanish, 1st international social media activist in Montevideo with people from "Movimiento de estudiantes" de Chile, "Indignados" from Spain, "Yo Soy 132" from Mexico, "Utopia" from France and "Occupy Wall Street" Laura Gotessdiener!! amazing and happening in my hometown this weekend! http://www.redesfa.com/#!

And i want to send them the video en español?!@richarddbartlett read below

This is a great reminder for those of us who think about features and design all the time.

http://justinjackson.ca/words.html

More pages loaded faster with less errors and happier users :)

Great job team!

The Joel Test

The Joel Test

Do you use source control?
Can you make a build in one step?
Do you make daily builds?
Do you have a bug database?
Do you fix bugs before writing new code?
Do you have an up-to-date schedule?
Do you have a spec?
Do programmers have quiet working conditions?
Do you use the best tools money can buy?
Do you have testers?
Do new candidates write code during their interview?
Do you do hallway usability testing?

From that article: "The other trouble is that it's so easy to get knocked out of the zone. Noise, phone calls, going out for lunch, having to drive 5 minutes to Starbucks for coffee, and interruptions by coworkers -- especially interruptions by coworkers -- all knock you out of the zone. If a coworker asks you a question, causing a 1 minute interruption, but this knocks you out of the zone badly enough that it takes you half an hour to get productive again, your overall productivity is in serious trouble. If you're in a noisy bullpen environment like the type that caffeinated dotcoms love to create, with marketing guys screaming on the phone next to programmers, your productivity will plunge as knowledge workers get interrupted time after time and never get into the zone."

From a link from that article:

Moral of the story: get 5 users to test any new code and test often.

Montevideo today, Teachers voting, the decision was they will occupy all public schools tomorrow until they have an increase in their salaries of only 6%. those colours remind me of Loomio https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=613220018702365&set=a.613243652033335.1073741863.131947030163002&type=1&theater

A online learning ruby and rails curriculum link

and another one from the University of Texas. Starting this next week.

@simontegg gracias!

Hey devs, you will want to bookmark this site.

@simontegg yowzers! that's sweet.

super handy

Shared Lunches this week

Tuesday : Beans + Greens + Tortillas

I'm gonna make a swag of lazy medium-spiced beans (kidney beans, onion, garlic, some herbs+spices).
to accompany mescalin type greens, ~20 tortillas, and maybe a couple of tomatoes

If you'd like to supplement, or throw down some coin, feel free, but fine either way.

please add comments if you're bringing other ingredients to share

@jonlemmon @jessedoud @richarddbartlett @simontegg @aaronthornton @vivienmaidabornloo @hannahsalmon @benjaminknightloom @robertguthrie @chelsearobinson ...uhhh add if i missed

I'm in John. I'll give you some dollars tomorrow

Nightweb connects your Android device or PC to an anonymous, peer-to-peer social network. You can write posts and share photos, and your followers will retrieve them using BitTorrent running over the I2P anonymous network. It is still experimental and not well-tested, but the goal is to have uncensorable, untraceable communication and file-sharing on mobile devices and PCs.

Being developed collaboratively on Reddit.

All the companies in this article should be using Loomio.

The Boss Stops Here

Some interesting thoughts about organizing non-hierarchical companies in there as well.

@annaguenther when we're ready we should contact people like the author of this article... he should be writing about us!

@alannakrause You could write to the companies mentioned as a start?!

@alannakrause wow - reading right now. There's a few things I think we should do:
1) share the link on our FB / Twitter
2) contact the companies (too right @sophiejerram)
3) contact the author :)

Any thoughts on wording greatly welcomed!
1 minute ago · Like · Delete

@sophiejerram I am on leave - if anyone has capacity to do outreach, please do! @annaguenther i'd say go for it :)

@annaguenther we need to talk! There is a plan!

@sophiejerram let's skype - are you still in Europa? Would love to hear your thoughts :)

Sounds like Kim Dotcom will be appearing before a Parliamentary committee to voice opposition to the increase of GCSB poswers at 3.30. There's a live stream from 3.30 so that's when I assume it will be @benjaminknightloom @richarddbartlett @jonlemmon @jessedoud @robertguthrie @johnirving @aaronthornton

Thanks @hannahsalmon! Russel Norman says:

• Keith Locke (submission 30) 3.30pm – 3.45pm
• Tech Liberty (submission 108) 3.45pm – 4.00pm
• Vikram Kumar (submission 7) 4.10pm – 4.20pm
• Michael Koziarski (submission 36) 4.20pm – 4.30pm
• Internet New Zealand (submission 120) 4.30pm – 4.50pm
• Dr Kate Dewes and Rob Green (submission 86) 4.50pm – 5.05pm
• Kim Dotcom and Bram van der Kolk (submission 112) 5.05pm – 5.20pm
• Fr Gerard Burns (submission 88) 5.30pm – 5.40pm
• Simon Terry (submission 70) 5.40pm – 6.00pm

FYI @benjaminknightloom

The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America

Hoping we are part of the antidote...

Hey just to let you guys know @noelia and I are invited to the first "Occupy Copenhagen radio show" on Monday. That would be an informal thing, the original idea was just to have a few drinks together but it turns out that we can make it part of their radio show, which I think it's a good way to share our reflections.

It's probably not going to be too specific about Loomio, but more general on decision making, what processes can work for Occupy (especially occupy CPH) etc… But still we have that opportunity to share a glimpse of what the Loomio story is.

Just posting that here in case anyone would have objections, suggestions etc…

Just to say I'm right into a frenzy of excitement for Loomio at the moment and it's bubbling through my entire self!
...

I am just opening my eyes on how much potential there is here in Copenhagen, and for the first time in four months, I feel really happy to be here :D

The Guardian has a whole hub on social enterprise co-operatives ... @annaguenther can you get us on here?

@alannakrause - I dub you, the finder of amazing links :) I will add that to a doc I have of potential blogs / online media to contact. Will get cracking on that once @sophiejerram is back.

Hmmm maybe the process the Loomio dev team uses has a name after all... Programmer Anarchy

Programmer Anarchy is a concept that has been around for about the last year, is considered “post-Agile”, has so far been evangelised by Fred George and says that software development is more productive when programmers are “self organised”.

Appears to be basically agile without managers... @jonlemmon @robertguthrie @johnirving

I love the Wall! Such a wealth of shared research. Here's a course for teaching yourself Ruby, translated by Rob Sobers from Learn Python the Hard Way by Zed Shaw:
http://ruby.learncodethehardway.org/

Problems With The Open Source Ecology Project

This short Q&A with Stewart Brand is worth reading. An early hacker and activist, he started the first social network, founded The Long Now, and coined the phrase "Information wants to be free."

There is a common feeling that when you're making something new you had better get the structure of it right, because it may wind up being the structure of everything important in the future. The computer scientist Jaron Lanier describes that feeling as "karma vertigo".

Last week an awesome project called Incoma launched in beta.

It's a free software tool for mapping discussions in a really unique non-linear way, inspired by the potential of online tools to tap into collective intelligence and the Indignados movement. I think people like @micahdaigle will find it interesting!

@miguelaranacatania is one of the people behind it - welcome to the community Miguel!

(more specifically the M15 movement)

Hey Loomions! We're going to have a party… you should come. 9 August @ 6pm @ the Sustainability Trust in Wellington. RSVP to me, or here.

Thank you @benjaminknightloom!

Please be patient with Incoma, it is just the first beta version :P

Love to hear your comments. (and it is free software so also love to see your changes)

And the previous url for Incoma did not work, so here is the right one:

http://incoma.org

@annaguenther is this just a physical party or is there a virtual element to it?

P.S. Trust you've heard this Co-op called Loomio has gone worldwide in reach now!! ...It great!!

Hey @neilmorris - we've had such interest from around the world, we might need to figure out a google hangout or something. Or, just plan parties all around the world to join in :) Would be very early in your part of the world for wine though...

@annaguenther I think ambition is needed here. Parties all around the world would be great. I think we'd all get to meet some interesting people! ....maybe one year on!

Time wise, yes just a little early in the morning for wine! We'll just have to make it a rolling party through the time zones of the world.....

@miguelaranacatania I had a play on incoma. I loved the sense that the conversation teaches you about conversation. Thank you for sharing

Nice red heart just popped up on my browser after a refresh. It keeps catching my eye and drawing me in... ;-)

I've ordered a half-dozen of these brain zappers for the code team. Velocity is gonna go through the roof!

@simontegg I might need two

Khan academy's donate page, now accepting bitcoin

In his TEDxTeAro talk @benjaminknightloom describes Loomio as a cooperative social enterprise, so I was wondering what makes a social enterprise a social enterprise? And found this: http://s.coop/1rqs2

FYI the TEDx talk is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vCL4I19o9U

:)

Software is the new bureaucracy. Discuss...

Recent Paul Graham article: Do Things That Don't Scale. TLDR: early on, recruit users manually and give them an overwhelmingly good experience.

Hi everyone! Iam back! got back yesterday just in time for the shakes which was pretty scary but glad to be home :) ready to continue my work with loomio and keep learning, just went to transifex and noticed more strings to translate which is really exciting! i heard party was a blast! will catch up with loomio discussions in the next few days and i hope to catch up with you personally soon, abrazo!

just watch your TEDx talk @benjaminknightloom :) awesome! beautifully explained!

Here is a really great 'Long Now' talk about slow & fast thinking.

Daniel Kahneman is the world’s most influential psychologist because he has, based on empirical research, figured out how we can notice when we are not thinking rationally. That knowledge gives us the choice to think “slow”---ignore brisk intuition and notional risks---when we decide we really need to get something right.

@vivienmaidabornloo It's interesting to think about how the two sorts of thinking map on to the divergent & convergent stages of an ideal Loomio discussion you were sketching out yesterday.

http://longnow.org/seminars/02013/aug/13/thinking-fast-and-slow/

Hey folks here's some clips from a talk I gave yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I78I6l1nzI

One thing that didn't make it to camera was my extended disclaimer about how my personal views don't necessarily represent the views of the Loomio project generally ;)

There's an interesting public group 'Build a Hybrid [Resource Based Economy] Now' bubbling away here at the moment.

I've been reflecting on that fact that I have got into a bad habit of using @mentions to turn group conversation into one-on-one debates. Sometimes direct responses are appropriate, but they're not the same as third person @mentions (@so-and-so put it nicely when they said…), and they do tend to crank up the heat in a discussion when they turn it into verbal ping-pong between two people, in person, and online.

Perhaps there should be a different character for direct responses? Or maybe it's just something I need to be aware of, and try to avoid misusing @mentions?

@strypey yeah, I hear you. We've been talking about building a direct "reply-to-this-comment" feature, which would hopefully resolve the issue you're talking about. Then at-mentions can go back to being more about mentioning people, instead of about replying to them directly.

Thanks Jon, that sounds like a good feature. Have you considered the idea of making direct replies private, along the lines of what I suggest here, and only group replies visible to everyone?
https://www.loomio.org/discussions/6416

Just coz I think it's good when the method for making public and private comments are clearly separate, and accessed by a different part of the UI, to avoid FB-style public/private confusion.

BTW Good to see I'm not the only person using @mentions for direct responses ;-)

Hey @annaguenther and @chelsearobinson, this is the talk I mentioned the other day about business as a social movement - some interesting ideas you might not expect from a 110-year-old hearing aid company :)

If Self-Management Is Such a Great Idea, Why Aren't More Companies Doing It?

"... about 20 organizations have come to Morning Star to learn more. And how many have then gone back and revamped their own operations to be more like what Drucker urged and the company has implemented?

Paul Green Jr., who helps run the Self-Management Institute that Morning Star launched to share its experiences, shakes his head. “To the best of my knowledge, zero of them have done anything meaningful,” he says..."

I don't know morning star, it seems to be something quite close to the holacracy spirit, am I right?

I think for company the change is not only blocked from the side of the huge salaries, even low salaries may actually think that the system in which they are since so long time is not so bad. Problem of cognitive dissonance...

14 Ways to Contribute to Open Source without Being a Programming Genius or a Rock Star:
http://blog.smartbear.com/programming/14-ways-to-contribute-to-open-source-without-being-a-programming-genius-or-a-rock-star/

This is All Your App IS: A Collection of Tiny Details:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/05/this-is-all-your-app-is-a-collection-of-tiny-details.html

Uses an automated cat feeder as an example of user-driven development and iteration. Priceless!

A great article about engagement and why it is so important. Also some great data about the difference in outcomes for a company with enagagement compared to those without.

engagement article

Would Be Nice
An edit button for comments and proposals (only for the person who created it)

Multi-stakeholder co-ops sound pretty great! Seems ideal for Loomio in the long-run.

Our friends at Sensorica seem to be using Loomio to develop their 'open value network'
https://plus.google.com/communities/107417561773024707336 [ctrl f: 'loomio']. Interesting content here
@tiberiusbrastavice

Oh wow... @rebekawhale just posted this on Yammer with the comment "Life before Loomio". Painful!!

From the Economist... Processing power: The internet helps politicians listen better to their electors. If they want to

TRANQUIL and picturesque, Friesland in northern Germany might seem an unlikely spot for an experiment in digital politics. Its population is ageing, its broadband patchy. Yet for five months local people have developed and submitted recommendations to their councillors using a website called LiquidFeedback, best known as the policy-setting platform favoured by the Pirate party, a tech-loving outfit that has won seats in four regional parliaments. Some citizens have voted for the council to stop publishing the location of speed cameras (on the ground that this helps drivers avoid them); others demand more say in how schools spend their money. Sönke Klug of the local council says he gets telephone calls every week, from big cities and small towns, asking for advice.

But...

Consultations are one thing. Acting on the results is another. Tiago Peixoto, an expert on government innovation, worries that poorly planned participatory exercises could risk creating “a new generation of disillusioned citizens”. In Iceland in 2011 the citizen council elected to write the country’s new constitution adopted an open approach that included releasing drafts online and inviting advice and criticism through social media. Voters approved its work in a referendum in October, but lawmakers have still to ratify the document. An election on April 27th will prolong the wrangling.

I'm still keen to follow up at some point on building some “open source” resources around creating and running democratic businesses. Discovered this via a permaculture contact and thought it might be of interest:
http://www.governancealive.com/

See also Introduction to Dynamic Governance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyWRrK_JEoM#t=11

This article is amazing, and provides and in-depth analysis of all the reasons Loomio is not and will never be a voting app. Looking at both voting in representative democracies and online voting sites like Reddit, we can see that they simply serve to reinforce structural oppression and reflect the desires of the majority and the privileged.

Very Serious Populists

@simontegg @richarddbartlett @matthewbartlett

What makes a group smart? Turns out it's less to do with super intelligent individuals, and more to do with social perceptiveness, taking turns speaking, and women. Go figure. :-)

How can we make the Loomio Community smarter?

ha! "More women were correlated with a more intelligent group. Interestingly, this last result is not just a diversity result. It’s not just saying that you need groups with some men and some women. It looks like that it’s a more or less linear trend. That is, more women are better all the way up to all women."

They go on to say it comes down to social perceptiveness and other skills which I would call "facilitation" and "holding space" - these are skills women are socialized a lot more to have in our society often times. I am really keen on us recognizing and improving our group's skills in these areas (more than we already have). I certainly don't believe it's an inherent issue of sex and that men can be very socially perceptive, of course. It's just a skill that requires practice and conscious attention.

The videos from UX Design Day are up now. The talks I found most helpful were Ruth Brown from Trademe, about A/B testing; and Philip Fierlinger from Xero, about their design process.

@jonlemmon @matthewbartlett @alannakrause Perhaps 'How do we make Loomio Community smarter" reaches the "deserves its own discussion" threshold.

One challenge with the 'Loomio Community' in its online sense is, there's no way to blend into the background and be visible for all to see, at the same time (ooh, you got any more G.K Chesterton for us, @matthewbartlett ? This is right up his alley).

In a real room, you can get a felt sense for 'presencing' and 'absencing' (in Theory U terms), without necessarily doing or saying anything. You can practice non-interference.

Online, I can't participate without drawing attention to myself. And I have no clue who is present or absent, literally or figuratively.

Agree that could be a useful discussion on its own, @johngraham. At present when I want to 'participate without participating' I do it by liking comments in a discussion I'm otherwise silent in. Loomio of the future is likely to include the concepts of 'following' a discussion (not requiring commenting or liking), and a display of 'who's in the room' (like the attached).

Funny, last night I just re-listened to that portion of A Miscellany of Men that I guess you must have read. (listened on Librivox, if you're interested)

@matthewbartlett Woooow nice......I was going to turn around and say, okay I can't yet do all those things online - if Loomio can help me learn, then great.

No I haven't read much Chesterton in the original, just a little Father Brown (a postman got away with murder because he was 'hidden in plain sight'). Thanks for the links.

Mockup looks great, and I imagine the new 'discussion-centric' focus will help me a lot.

By the way, that (potentially annoying) thing I did by starting a new thread Re: that discussion in the Design group which I'm not in ? That would have been solved if I could have 'liked' your comment in that thread without having to join the group.

Or of course I could have 'practiced non-interference' more.

Merry Christmas!

Here's a really interesting wiki put together by the group Gentils Virus (google translated from the French): http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwiki.gentilsvirus.org%2Findex.php%2FLoomio

Includes technical info on using Loomio + info on GV's own cultural layer on top of Loomio.

Interesting writeup on meditation and technology... What a combo! Is everyone looking after their mental health as much as their physical health?
https://medium.com/mindfulness-and-meditation/301ad5a76bd6

Interesting move by reddit.
They're going to donate 10% of all ad revenue to non-profits
http://www.redditblog.com/2014/02/decimating-our-ads-revenue.html

How French High Theory and Dr. Seuss can help explain Silicon Valley’s Gender Blindspots

Whatever the way forward, it’s not “we’re outsiders, basically” therefore we couldn’t possibly be exclusionary. And diversity in newsroom or in the development team is not just a feel-good, but a functional need as well. Fiascos such as Google Buzz in which they did not realize the extend of the backlash they’d endure by making people’s email contacts visible to each other, or Grantland’s infamous story in which they could not figure out what was offensive about hounding and outing a trans individual (they didn’t have a single one to look over the story) are some recent examples in which diversity among decision makers would have really helped bring much-needed different viewpoints to the table.

I just finished reading 'Maverick!' by Ricardo Semler, of Brazilian manufacturing company Semco, and I highly recommend it. It's an amusing and inspiring write-up of the companies many experiments with workplace democracy, motivated by Semler's fundamental belief that workers need to be treated as adults, whose ideas and initiatives are just as useful to the company as the labour they perform.

One of my favourite practices is that new hires are interviewed by the workers who will be their subordinates, as well as their superiors, and nobody is hired without full approval by both.

For those who don’t have time to read a book right now, here’s a 20 minute 2007 interview with Ricardo Semler by ABC:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxeosFrLFH8

…and a 14 minute 2005 doco about Semco called ‘The Caring Capitalist’, made by Journeyman Pictures:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG3HPX0D2mU

Yesterday Loomio spoke with Colleen from PlaceSpeak in Vancouver, today she introduced us to David Bartlett exPremier of Tasmania, and his Ted Talk on how the crowd is changing democracy and the importance of free open internet space.
is is worth a watch

Fantastically thoughtful article about the democratic spirit and practice at Occupy Wall St by one Benjamin Barber:
http://logosjournal.com/2011/fall_barber/

The pope, keen on co-ops: http://coopgeek.wordpress.com/2014/04/09/the-co-op-pope/

' remember — I was a teenager — I was 18 years old: it was 1954, and I heard my father speak on Christian cooperativism and from that moment I developed an enthusiasm for it, I saw that it was the way. It is precisely the road to equality, not to homogenity, but to equality in difference. Even economically it goes slowly. I remember that reflection my father gave: it goes forward slowly, but it is sure.'

very interesting blog from discourse on how they manage free
http://blog.discourse.org/2014/02/discourse-installs-for-non-profit-and-education/

Long post from Dave Pollard: Systems Thinking and Complexity 101 Relevant to organisational change @vivienmaidaborn @chelsearobinson

I just watched The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3268458/
It's a great movie (though sad ending of course), filled with many names connected to Loomio!

OK, rookie question: why are discussions displayed with the oldest comments first, or at least with an option to display in order of oldest/most recent?

@sionwhellens you can read the entire history of that story in the chronology thread.

Another probably rookie question: some of our members report that Loomio did not register their vote, I had the same issue (can't work out what I did differently when it went through). Any pointers? Browser issue?

Hey @sionwhellens not sure what's going on there... @hannahsalmon is going to look into it.

Hi @sionwhellens, if possible would you mind providing a little more information about the problem you experienced? Did the users you are referring to definitely click the submit button? Navigating away before clicking submit will not record the selected answer. Any details you could provide will make it easier to get to the root of the problem :)

I'll check with others, but my recollection is that I clicked on something like 'register your vote' and nothing happened. I think I had to refresh a couple of times before it responded.

Hi @hannahsalmon, here's the feedback: "i clicked on the voting buttons twice (vote early vote often) but nothing happened on the ipad. i will try agin on a PC and see if that works." My own problem also happened on an iPad.

Safari for iPad?

@hannahsalmon this is a known bug on iOS - would you be interested in taking a look?

Hi @sionwhellens, we're looking into this now. Thanks for the heads up :)

@simon @matthewbartlett have you seen https://pol.is/ ?

Hey everybody.
I'm interested in getting in touch with people from (or living in) Denmark, that are interested in politics and Loomio. I'm involved in a new political party and we're working on how to use Loomio as part of our policy development process.
We're setting up our own instance of Loomio (could be a way to also test some new features and give feedback to the Loomio community)

Want to hear more?
Drop me an e-mail: mads.ringblom@alternativet.dk
@ronanmchugh, @nicolaswormser, @jordifaxedas ?

@madsringblom - @robertguthrie is interested in some people going through the process of installing a Loomio instance and giving feedback about the documentation he's been working on for that. Would you be interested in that?

@alanna
Sure.
We're working closely together with Samutveckling from Sweden though and I think they're already in touch with Rob :)

@madsringblom We could meet sometime in Copenhagen. I'm living in an Ashram/monastery close to Vig now but I do visit the capital from time to time.

@nicolaswormser Cool! Just drop me a mail and we'll figure something out :)

I really enjoyed Slack's onboarding process:

Slack Bot [11:49 AM]
Hi mhjb. I can help you with many different parts of Slack. For example, things like files, channels, search, activity, starring, mobile, commands, or keyboard shortcuts. You can click on those terms or type "/help" followed by any term you want help with (e.g., "/help files" or "/help commands"). Or, if you just want to tell us what you think about Slack, you can type "/feedback" followed by whatever you'd like to say to the team at Slack.

Slack Bot [11:54 AM]
Hi, Slackbot here! To make things easier for your teammates, I can set up a few personal details for you.

Slack Bot [11:54 AM]
To start, what is your first name?

----- Today January 19th, 2015 -----

Matthew Bartlett [10:49 AM]
Matthew

Slack Bot [10:49 AM]
Matthew. Great! Now, what is your last name?

Matthew Bartlett [10:49 AM]
Bartlett

Slack Bot [10:50 AM]
Nice to meet you Matthew Bartlett! (Tip: If you ever need to change your name or profile information, you can do so by editing your Profile Page.)

Slack Bot [10:50 AM]
You can also add a photo there. Things look so much better with a picture of you. I’m happy to wait while you do that, but if you want to just keep going, say “continue” or “keep going” or even “go”.

Slack Bot [10:50 AM]
Nice photo!

Slack Bot [10:50 AM]
Would you like to add your Skype username to your profile? If yes, please enter it now, otherwise type “no”.

Matthew Bartlett [10:50 AM]
mhjbnz

Slack Bot [10:50 AM]
OK: mhjbnz. Got it.

Slack Bot [10:50 AM]
Would you like to display your phone number on your profile? If so, please enter it now, otherwise say “no”.

Matthew Bartlett [10:50 AM]
027 211 3455

Slack Bot [10:50 AM]
Right. 027 211 3455. OK, last question. What is your role on your team? For example, you might say “Software engineer”, “Customer support associate”, “Marketing bigwig”, or “Pointy-haired Boss” (or “no” if you don’t want to set a role).

Matthew Bartlett [10:51 AM]
Co-op member

Slack Bot [10:51 AM]
Congratulations, you have completed your profile! Again, if I got anything wrong, you can edit it on your Profile Page.
NEW MESSAGES

Slack Bot [10:51 AM]
Feel free to give us feedback at any time by typing /feedback in Slack or emailing us at feedback@slack.com. Follow https://twitter.com/slackhq on twitter to ask questions, learn about new features, and get tips on making the most of Slack.

Anyone in a position to 'pay it forward' after Loomio's successful crowdfunding? Positive News has spent 22 years applying the 'social enterprise' model to new reporting, and they have one week left to get to the target for their current crowdfunding effort:
http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/positivenews?utm_content=bufferebf73&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Thanks @matthewbartlett and @richarddbartlett , Positive News managed to raise more than 250,000 UK pounds. Like Loomio, I think this is a sign that, as Paul Mason put it in the Guardian, the end of capitalism has begun.

Edit: another sign, Forbes has published an article entitled Why Financialization Has Run Amok

Just checked out the pitch video for BitVote! Peer-to-peer, encrypted voting, using the Etherium blockchain.

We renamed the project “Mattermost” to emphasize the importance of communication. We believe that 1) internal messaging–across PCs and phones, with file sharing, archiving and search–is a vital layer of IT in a “post-email” world, 2) the platform for internal messaging needs to be open, and 3) that we wanted Mattermost to be the leading project to serve as the open layer for internal communications.

Why we made MatterMost.

Hey, I've had a search but couldn't find any answers. I can't seem to use markdown in the new Loomio. Is this just not available or is there another way to format text in the new version? All I get is this...

What happens when you try, Harry? It should just work, most places you can enter text.

Testing

Testing

• testing

This is what I see in browser but when I looked at this on my phone it seemed to work. I'm using Chrome on a mac.

This happens hello

Hi @wikihouseharry, it looks as though there is a space between your square brackets and parentheses. I think if you eliminated that space it would work.

Oh good that seems to work. I didn't have to do that in the old Loomio, should have used my common sense and tried the obvious thing :p

Like this?

Check out the Ind.ie Ethical Design manifesto. Some beautiful work there.

I just received my print copy of issue 84 of PositiveNews in the new colour magazine format. Loomio got an honourable mention in a feature article on e-democracy, which you can also read on the PositiveNews website.

Essential watching for anyone associated with Loomio: 'The Lifecycle of a Revolution' - Black Hat keynote by Jennifer Granick.
EDIT: for some reason Jennifer's talk actually starts about 15:40 into the video :P

I've just been trying out Kune (a group-based fork of Apache Wave) using the instance at Kune.cc. It's very impressive, offering EtherPad style realtime document collaboration (including live side chat) but with authenticated users and a group system. This could be excellent for use in parallel with a Loomio instance, using the same user accounts for both. EDIT: Wave uses XMPP for federation which I assume means a Wave server's internal chat could also be connected to the XMPP cloud. EDIT2: Corrected my mistaken impression that Kune.cc was an instance of Wave, rather than a fork.

Thanks to Frank from NextCloud, i just discovered the User Data Manifesto 2.0.

Advertising a job in an Aotearoa social enterprise? Consider listing it on DoGoodJobs.

Deploying new code to Loomio.org after 8pm on a Friday night? You folks are admirably dedicated!

Loomio is ranked #2 on Slant.io in answer to the question "What are the best collaborative decision-making platforms?". Congratulations! Also, once you deploy all the new polling features, it would be a good idea to make sure someone updates your entry on the Free Software Directory to reflect the new features.

Here's a proposed creed for Loomio use, based on the warrior's creed in the fanatasy series 'The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever' by Stephen Donaldson.

Do not start a thread where a comment will do,
Do not start a subgroup where a thread will do,
Do not start a group where a subgroup will do,
Do not set up a server where a group will do.

The greatest sysadmin is she that does not need another Loomio server.

(BTW: This seems to have become the "Strypey's shower thoughts" thread ;) )

Forget the "cloud" hype, high-traffic sites can be hosted from home with a decent desktop box and a fibre connection. Time to boycott TheStacks and go back to organisations having their own server(s) in their own secure premises?

That's why FttH is so important. It opens up so many possibilities for business and collaboration.

Absolutely. I find it strange that people are paying for secure premises and a fat pipe for co-working, then instead of having their servers there, at least for dev and testing, they let all their base belong to Amazon or some other EvilCorp.