New feature: Poll threads

Last week we released a big update to Loomio - here's what's new:

If you start a proposal without starting a discussion first, and someone votes — thoughtfully sharing their reasoning along with their vote — you can now reply to them, and they can reply back to you.

That's it. Commenting on polls. Before now, you would have had to start a discussion, then start a proposal within that discussion.

Every group makes decisions differently

If you're new to Loomio, we recommend that you start a discussion, and then — after people have had a chance to ask questions and share information — start a proposal. It makes it easier to get the details of the proposal right, and it's good idea to hear concerns and address them before before voting.

However, there are valid reasons you may not want to start with a discussion. So, if you start a proposal, send out vote notifications, and find out someone voted "disagree" with a concern that needs a response: you can now reply, address the concern, and move forward together.

Close thread → Lock thread

Because every poll is now also its own thread, and polls already have a concept of "closing", we renamed Close thread to Lock thread. You can only lock a thread after any proposals in the thread have closed.

A note on the development process

This was a very big set of changes - it took three months of development and required rethinking every aspect of what a thread is, and how it works in Loomio. The scope of work was bigger than initially estimated. We did our best to make it a great release, but there were some bugs, and minor design decisions that we got wrong. I think we've resolved all the feedback we've received. To those of you who had disrupted Loomio service, my apologies. To those of you who got in touch, thank you.

Please share any questions or feedback you have here, or privately via Contact Support in the sidebar, and I'll respond.

We will be posting to the Loomio Community group more frequently and I look forward to engaging with you about work in progress. Next up will be a link to a public roadmap to help people understand what's coming next.