Just FYI, here's the radio-button survey that Coursera.org is forcing participants to complete on entry:

Welcome, John!

There are just a couple things to do before we start the course.
1. Please tell us your goals

Your answers will help us to better serve students like you. This will not affect your grade.

How many of the lecture videos do you intend to watch?
* All
* Half or more
* Less than half
* None

How many of the assignments and quizzes do you intend to do?
* All
* Half or more
* Less than half
* None

2 Sign the Coursera Honor Code
....[followed by code of conduct, must agree to continue]

Again, I like that this kind of thing could be used for focusing intention and pausing for thought, rather than for data collection or permanent commitments.

@traceyambrose as I said earlier..

"Could have radio button options in statement to provide feedback on specific parts of statement/declaration. For example, a choice of agree, undecided or disagree. A negative response could automatically respond with further information as to why a goal or value is important to the group." - there can also be an option to contest.

Perhaps not all of the Statement needs to be accepted either, there can even be a pass percentage for the parts of Statement that do require feedback.

For example, if someone only agrees with 30% of Statement, they are unlikely to add value to the consensus. So perhaps they won't be allowed in, or allowed in but not to participate, or have permitted participation limited to certain sub-groups, or certain priority discussions.

@steveray what I mean is, if we're overly value-neutral in design - by restricting even the option to set moral/spiritual principles - we empower a powerful nihilistic wasteland of a culture to weaken the performance of the platform.

I guess a goal of Loomio is to a facilitative a constructive environment, one with a good combination of understanding, love and discipline. And so to discourage the creation of an antagonistic environment. So it should find the correct balance between design that enables conflict and design that enables constructive debate.

Science shows how negative commentary can destroy consensus, even if the commentary is agreed to be incorrect. So we should be pro-active about encouraging constructive debate in an intelligent manner - one that doesn't produce unwanted positive bias of outcome.

A relatively steadfast moral conviction over certain values and principles is a wonderful thing. Hence the beauty of "block". Without it we weaken ourselves and encourage detrimental compromise within crowds and culture. So should be supported.

If I'm understanding @stevenpalmer correctly, what he's proposing is a way of introducing a potential new group member to the group culture, preparing them to work constructively with its members. This could include everything from basic ground rules of discussion, eg:
* criticize ideas but don't attack people
* no hate speech
* keep comments concise (comments longer than 5 sentences will be deleted to prevent ranting)

... to explanations of how the group uses Loomio features eg:
* a proposal is passed if it was open for at least a week, and has only 'yes' or 'abstain' positions
* a proposal is only passed if more than 2/3 of group members took a position
* if 2 or more people block, the proposal is abandoned and discussion continued
* blocks have no special function, and will be treated as a 'no'

If someone joins Loomio groups with the intention of trolling, rather than participating constructively, agreeing to a moderation/ engagement policy before joining might be enough to put them off. If not, it gives the coordinators a clear basis for taking action to prevent them disrupting the group.

@strypey not quite, although your last paragraph is correct.

Not all rules need to be written and/or agreed to. General behaviours can be worked out as we go along through discussion, moderation and user learning. Some of the rules suggested above are such a strong given for some people that it's perhaps better not to pre-emptively question them about or ask them to read.

I'm more interested about highlighting and protecting the core values and principles of a group.

For example, if a person joins a group, it may be just to give their opinion against that group or against part of that groups foundation or core basis for existing. Not to actually support that group and contribute to conducive discussion and decision making.

A person may not like Animals and/or not believe in Animal Rights, but they may join Animals Rights group, fly under the radar through seemingly respectful or quiet interaction, or perhaps obvious but irreversible interaction, same effect, a group's mental environment and views are negatively influenced. This is just one example.

Intelligently, guard against fracture points and support group cohesion.

"Individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values." - link

‘Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons’ - this article may help. The commons in this case being both metaphysical and physical, our collective attention, consciousness, wisdom, momentum, mood, trust, time, energy and material resources.

"Defending communication environment" - page 174

While reading here i had to ask: can loomio handle "Not creating similar group"-to prevent many groups talking about the same thing, by searching the existing groups once a new group is to set up?
Adding keywords (hashtags) to the description would help the search engine.

Does any one of loomio designer used to know weiserearth platform and their group taxonomy ? They did great work there as well as on the dashboard and many other features for huge communication environment ..

Hi @waelalsaad - is this related to the rest of the discussion in this thread? If not, maybe it should be its own discussion?

@alanna it was tough as new here to go through all the proposed features to figure out if this need new discussion.
But i think it makes sense to amend the proposal above to include "existing group check feature". if its not possible i would propose it.