Better oversight of threads in Groups

I agree that it can be quite helpful for groups to allow members to re-open discussions whenever they want to. I would not agree that that would be desirable for all groups, especially in the case of very large groups which Loomio may see in the future.

I could have been clearer with this bit from my last comment:

Perhaps for some communities, it should be possible to reopen an archived thread simply by commenting upon it. However, it could be helpful to require an extra click or two, with something such as: "Commenting here will reopen this topic. Are you sure?" Also, some large communities may want to require someone to 'second' or 'third' efforts to reopen a topic.

At that time, I was just trying to get those ideas out there for others to consider. However, my specific personal recommendation would be to create such options in "Advanced Settings" for each Loomio group. (Probably, with a default setting of "Let anyone re-open an Archived topic by commenting upon it.) Providing options would enable each group's admins to select whatever worked best for them: hopefully, in accord with feedback from group members.

Hi Matt...just looking at the Children's ministry thread, we have heaps of threads that are dormant, would really like to shift them into an archive subfolder...could we do that? Might need to consult, one person's 'long dormant thread' is another person's 'burning issue that must be reignited immediately!'

Check out this blog post about organising your Loomio group, especially the section about creating a thread archive. I think it might help.

http://blog.loomio.org/2016/04/23/organise/

I recall a few months ago seeing a Loomio instance 'in the wild' (i.e. not hosted here) being used by one of the Pirate Parties. They had added a fifth, purple, voting option, which meant something like "I commit to making this happen". Seemed like a really cool idea and I wonder how it works in practice there.

Heaps of people I've been talking to lately use a combo of Loomio, Trello, and Slack to do deliberation, project management, and instant messaging respectively. Trello does such a brilliant job of tracking tasks, due dates, responsibilities, checklists etc, I wouldn't want to try to build Loomio out to compete with that awesome functionality.

I would love to see what a Loomio <-> Trello integration would look like. Hopefully my brain will get some space to think about that soon. Or maybe someone else can imagine it for us :)

Ok thanks, you've answered my question which is how to make the never-ending list of threads on the main page shorter and less scrolling through stale threads. You state to create an "archive" sub-group and move them there. Is this still the preferred method? I searched Loomio community for "archive threads" and landed on this thread.

Here's that extra voting option, used by Pirate Party Argentina (thanks for finding it, @jameskiesel). @gregorycassel @renato @josircardosogomes

I've reached out to the author to see if we can't get a diff to recreate in a plugin somehow, as this seems like a nice bit of extensiblility to have in the vault.

@johnrhoads that's still the best option, to my knowledge. We have an experimental new feature in testing at the moment that lets you add tags to threads. It may not be perfect for archiving purposes, but generally it could be useful for helping to organise threads. Want to try it out?

@mamari some options:

• If you've got a lot of people in the group, perhaps you could use a Loomio proposal to give a couple of people the mandate to make judgement calls about which threads to archive
• You could have a policy like 'threads are archived after 30 days of inactivity'
• Perhaps a nominated group facilitator could go through and leave a warning comment like 'this thread will be archived next week if there's no activity...'

Sure, I'm hip to trying it out. Is the tag manually attached to the thread or is it automated in any way? Tagging a thread automatically based on age would be cool while yet another tag to mark it as being involved in a closed decision might work as well. At the moment I'm using your emoji trick to contextualize threads. Thanks for the help.