Shall we create a crowd funding campaign for a Loomio app?

I love the steady & considered integrity with which Loomio develops.
I also wonder if the already pretty huge amount of people like myself, who are restlessly excited about Loomio could do anything to support the project, because we're here and we're keen! Whether that's doing a big search for developers (under some framework of guidance probably!) raising funds (sounds like perhaps not?) or anything else (I don't know! Somehow trying to remove/reduce some of the obstacles/unwanted pressures or distractions in the lives of those leading the development, whose time is evidently so precious in this project!)

I'm wondering if people perceive any compelling reasons to have a mobile app other than push notifications. This intrigues me because of the link James posted before. ( As of Chrome version 42, the Push API and Notification API are available to developers.. )

Wow that is so lovely @lukeflegg <3

To me the answer is not 'more resources', its 'more stigmergy'.

In my opinion, the challenge of developing a great UX that people love and making it economically sustainable is primarily a question of nurturing a great team. A great team can't help but produce valuable stuff.

Having worked with Loomio since the early days, I can say that the happiness and productivity of the team is directly proportional to the amount of focus we have. I'm always campaigning for us to do one thing well, and avoid everything else if we possibly can.

I'm going to keep advocating for my team to stay relentlessly focussed on one thing, even though that means saying 'no' to a lot of exciting enticing massively impactful opportunities.

At the same time, I don't feel like I own online decision-making, and I don't feel like I own this software: we made it open source because we reckon it can have it's greatest positive social impact if it is held in the commons.

I'm sure a dozen other teams could focus on a dozen other facets of this online decision-making challenge. Some of those teams might make a mobile app. And some of them will play nicely with loomio.org.

Our job, as the first stewards of Loomio, is to build the architecture in a way that eventually makes it possible for other people to contribute without asking for permission.

Thankfully, this is already happening, see for instance @nolandarilek's incredible work to port Loomio to Sandstorm: an easy way for people to securely host their own version of the software. Nolan didn't have to ask, they just got started. The first I heard of it was, "hey I'm doing this thing, do you want to help?" (Swoon!)

So now there is this whole new huge chunk of value in the Loomio ecosystem, and it cost our team almost zero expenditure of energy or distraction of focus. To me that is the web working at its best!

Luke, I'm not sure of the best way you can support Loomio. Asking these questions in such a thoughtful and considerate way feels like a pretty good start to me :)

This is a great discussion. I totally see the attraction of a native app, but I agree with the need for the core team to stay focused on the web app right now.

Leaving push notifications aside for right now (even though I know they are really important), I wonder if one cheap, easy, and helpful step would be to create a button in the app that just adds a shortcut to Loomio (via mobile browser) to your phone's homescreen. That's what I have - it has the Loomio icon and everything so it looks pretty much like the buttons for all my other apps, and when I click it and Loomio opens, the basic experience is very much like a native app. For a bunch of users, I think making this option easy would help them feel like Loomio on mobile is actually pretty OK. I use Loomio on my phone constantly and for me it works really well.

Making it easy to add Loomio to your phone's homescreen is probably a very cheap and very useful improvement. Here's how to do it on Android.

Adding app icon to iOS is quite easy too, although having to log in every time to open it means you need a very simple password

I should mention that another potentially easy win in this direction is a Twilio integration which allows us to send text messages to your phone with a link to the appropriate place to go. Is it a push notification? No. But actually it kinda is. :)

Just stumbled across this today: app centricity is primarily a US (and to a lesser extent AUS) phenomenon - most of the rest of the world is still really heavily web dependent. Would be interesting to see this info over time to see how it's growing (like, for example, is Europe becoming more app-centric over time?)

I readily believe that graphic @jameskiesel but would you happen to know the source?

http://operamediaworks.com/innovation-and-insights/state-of-mobile-advertising-2015-q2