Experimenting with multi- proposals

Yeah... I agree @gregorycassel
I'm not sure how much thinking has gone into the design of Loomio as a collaborative decision making system (DMS)... I presume a lot, but don't actually see that reflected in the design.

Working with colleagues at Southwark Council in London many years ago we developed a DMS to let all residents of the borough make proposals for borough wide policy, and enabled all residents to debate and vote on those proposals... it wasn't brilliant but revealed various lessons:

1. it is most useful to have the debate related to a proposal directly under that proposal (unlike here, where we have 2 active proposals now, but only this one debate thread)

2. it is useful to let debaters categorise their debate. i.e. are you arguing "For" or "Against" the proposal, or are you neutral? This helps see where the decision is likely to go and also to group arguments...

3. Proposals should be (able to be) 'time bound' (i.e. to have a set amount of time before votes are called and a limited time / quorum for voting)

4. one a vote has been called and a decision has been made it is no use ending there, because nothing may happen! Instead "decisions on proposals" need to be able to evolve into an "implementation" phase once decisions have been made. i.e. In Loomios case, be pushed through to an interoperable Project and task management system. This would also help force people to structure Proposals better, since they would need to specify "deliverables" etc

I would guess that pretty much every group on Loomio suffers the "what do we do now?" problem once a decision has been made and wonders which Project / Task Management / Group management system to use next, to coordinate the activities based on the decision which has been made...

The final phase of the DMS we designed, after "implementation" was an "Evaluation" which enabled residents to say how well they thought the proposal had been executed... feedback from this was then encouraged to be converted into new proposals, and so the cycle continued...

Proposals >> Debate >> Decisions >> Implementation >> Evaluation >> Proposals... etc :)

Thanks for your very thoughtful response @olisb . I know that quite a lot of thought has gone into Loomio's intentionally limited design-- and certainly, some of that thought involves the realities of running a (perhaps barely) economically sustainable software project which offers free software to all, and free hosting to most users.

I agree broadly with the four points in your last comment. I guess you've noticed that Loomio does provide #3. #4 is important. I'm developing a new task management system myself, but I think it's pretty easy to link Loomio decisions to existing task management systems and vice versa. (For instance, some Loomio groups do this with Trello, with Github "Issues" and Waffle.

Thanks @gregorycassel
can you explain how to "link" Loomio to Trello, or point me to somewhere I can read about that?

@olisb I simply meant that you can link directly to Trello cards in Loomio discussions, like this, or link from Trello cards to related Loomio discussions. Just generic linking ;)

Ah! @gregorycassel I see!
I'm quite familiar with basic linking ;)
But that is not at all what I was talking about... which I think you get...
I meant it would be cool if, in a proposal I propose:

Title: Build a space ship to go to the moon
Requirements: £1B, and XX full time people
Stages: Developing the space ship design - 2 years, Prototyping - 1 year, Testing - 2 months etc
etc

Then, when (if!?) the proposal gets enough votes to enter "implementation" stage it automatically gets ported to a Project & Task management System and is already pre-populated with the same "Stages" as listed above, in the proposal, plus all the people who contributed to / debated on the proposal are already "members" on the Project...

The idea being to remove the "lull" and boost the enthusiasm of people who contributed...
and to generally expedite the "decision" to "implementation" process.

I think that would be cool - and increase the efficiency of collaborative projects a lot

best
Oli

Yes, I get the idea of creating seamless interoperability between a decision-making system and a task management system. I work lots personally on simplifying communications & creative processes, but my work's more oriented toward reducing the number of software tools/platforms than creating interoperability/ application program interfaces etc between them. I believe that it takes a lot of new code to create such interoperability.

If you have any direct feedback or advice for the Loomio team I suggest you contact them, perhaps in Loomio Community.