Project management tool for passed proposals?

I can tell you how we do this in the Cooperative of Engineers that we run (we are 50).... We use Teambox.com instead of Asana and we have the following findings:

1) Please, please, use project oriented structure rather than departmental structures, the latest create impermeable communication between people and the ideas do not flow.

2) We find useful the following structure:

• Project "Welcome", to teach the new people getting inside your IT methods.
• Project "Agora", for the results of the assembly of members, the minutes, and statutes of your company/cooperative and the voting tools (such as Loomio).
• Project "Launch", never more than three projects to be launched urgently... the tasks have to have a responsible and a delivery date.
• Project "Proposals", cooking area where you decided the next project to be passed to "Launch" only when one of the three existing projects are finished. Those who propose a project are the responsible to organize the related task, there is never task without responsible.
• Project "Hepldesk and RRSS" where you deal with the externals of your organization.

3) Your first task is to decide how you are going to decide (as a group) once you get that, the rest is easy.. my proposal for that will be:

• For less that 10 people use the sociocratic method, that is to reach an agreement without voting if possible.. Loomio is very useful for that because you are not forced to make a voting proposal when you start a discusion, so the voting might not be necessary.
• In between 10 to 50 people, deliberative democracy use Loomio and most probably after a period of debate, you will need a voting.
• More that 50... you will have to go for a survey and get the people enough information to vote and encourage them to find information for themselves... my proposal is to do a survey with the systemic consensus method http://wiki.ic.org/wiki/Systemic_Consensus_Principle

Hope that help !

Ping @richarddbartlett @jonlemmon

Thanks @miguelpradosrodrig.

I really like Bettermeans but it sadly isn't really being maintained anymore - perhaps the loomio team could take it one! :P

The bettermeans code (a fork of Redmine):
https://github.com/Bettermeans/bettermeans

These intro videos are well worth watching for those not familiar with it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAlnMWlvw9g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wJAf229YUs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D–Ob2CxLds

We're working on a simple task tracker for Econsensus. It's been "very nearly finished" for a few months because all the devs got pulled off onto fixing UI issues ... :-)

We're not trying to replicate all the functionality of, say, Redmine which we use internally for task tracking, AND I think we can supply a basically useful Thing here. We think it's important to track action points, for historical transparency purposes.

I wonder if tracking action points would mean that you're swinging more towards tracking decisions taken. Currently, I think it could be easier to get an overview of historical decisions in Loomio. E.g. pagination, sorting, dates associated with decisions, working out which decisions are actually actionable and which are "we didn't decide anything here"?

For some organisations, just tracking decisions made in an accessible way would be an important improvement, even if they're not able to engage with the online decision making process, which Loomio obviously does well. E.g. organisations which are have different levels of tech awareness, and have tech-savvy secretarial groups. I live in one :-)

I can imagine the 85 members of my housing coop viewing an online page of decisions made for reference - and I know from experience that they won't necessarily behave themselves in a public forum (!), and not all of them are online, and general meetings in person are our main agreed way of deciding things, so working heavily online might feel exclusive to us, although we do knock around discussions occasionally by email.

A strong use-case we have at Aptivate is that we sometimes want to write up decisions from our face to face meetings, without ever going through an online discussion. So, in Econsensus, we allow people to create decisions as a separate entity, without going through a discussion or proposal first. We are talking about linking proposals more formally to discussions, to better model the consensus process, however I think we might retain this independence of decisions.

An alternative we discussed is to create a "meeting" as an object in the system, which can also spawn decisions, in the way that a discussion / proposal does, so that someone can always see where a decision was made. This is slightly conflicting with the idea of flexibility of the system - we can't currently imagine a way that we'd make a decision outside of some kind of meeting or an online discussion, however maybe some group will come up with it, or find it too cumbersome to go through that trail. So we leave a free text field to explain what meeting it came from, and that's it for now. Maybe it will be an option in future for groups to force that field or not.

hope that makes some sense :-)

Josef! Fancy banging into you here! Yeah I valourized the traces left behind by BetterMeans for the Loomio folks, and only later discovered, as you say, that it's a dodo (dead project). I don't know that Loomio would benefit much from trying to imitate BetterMeans, but I do think it would be bloody useful to see someone turn the functions BetterMeans added on top of the RedMine codebase into a plug-in which can be used with RedMine.

Oh this this this. Thanks Loomio. You have provided me exactly what I needed.

http://bettermeans.com/front/open_enterprise_governance_model.html

I think a free code¸project management group would be great, and it would be even better if it integrated with Loomio. I'm a fan of the unix philosophy though, many tools which each do one thing really well, rather than a multi-tool which does an ok job of some things, and a bad job of everything else.

Loomio is a decision-making platform. I would advise against adding a whole new suite of functions into it which might better be developed as a separate codebase, which could hook into Loomio through an API or something.

Right on Strypey! +1 for doing one thing well.

I am hoping we'll start to see different groups solving this problem in different ways, and a few popular options will emerge. At that point we can look at integrating with other services.

Love the labeling system of the econsensus place:
Question, Danger, Concerns, Consent, Comment, will make all sense to have those in Loomio (or voting features in econsensus). Econsensus is a wonderful name too.

@carlscrase are you/ your team going to pick up the BetterMeans codebase and bring it back to life?! :P

BTW, saw recently this fork which may come back to life:
https://github.com/mockdeep/better

@strypey I was waiting for you to notice I was here :)

Indeed @strypey, @richarddbartlett ! We've been having the "do one thing" conversation too. We already think we're basically doing two things - a forum-like conversation about current topics with the potential for decisions to be made, AND storing previous decisions. Both are important and could be modularised. Oh well... maybe a big refactor one day :-) We're doing our best to make the action points stuff modular so we can re-use it elsewhere. Would be nice if we could just plug in {task tracker of your choice here} through a simple API - and it felt important to have soon, and quicker to roll our own. The discussion will never be over... :-)

@miguelpradosrodrig - glad you like it! We started as openconsent and found it was already taken by some medical software... took us months to wash that name away :-) In terms of the words we're using, I think that Loomio may have a better angle - proposal-stuff like concerns, danger, consent is kept separate to comments and questions, which happen in the discussion. It seems to work ok for us to mix it up like this, for now, however we have said occasionally we'd like to see a clear list of single responses from everyone on a proposal - we can't do that using our current model.