Look forward to studying this. Thank you!
love
Midi

Bravo Alanna!!! and Loomio!!! I'll check it out since I'm a knowledge
junky and will be useful in promoting my "virtual meetings" at Democracy
at Work ;-).

Hi Alanna,

I am not a frequent Loomio user and thus have no Loomio-specific materials to share (though i do recommend Loomio regularly to groups in need of an online decision-making tool). However, i'm writing because if you want resources for f2f decision-making and collaboration, there are a ton of handouts & articles on my website Treegroup.info. I also highly recommend the deck Group Works: A Pattern Language for Bringing Life to Meetings and Other Gatherings, which is available in print, PDF and iPhone versions.

Thank you for producing this wonderful resource. You've build a great tool, learnt a lot about how to use it well and it's so generous of you to share this knowledge.

Thanks! I noticed the "new" decision types are only documented in the Beginner/Making decisions section (with great details, maybe too much detail for a getting started/beginner page?) and not all in the user manual (covering only proposals), which should be more detailed than a beginner page. I raised that issue (and one on the translation of Loomio School) on GitHub and @robertguthrie answered that the user manual should eventually be merged in Loomio School.

Working on translations and thinking about users, I think we should avoid unjustified duplication of information and make it clearer where to find which level of detail (even when the user manual is merged as a section of Loomio School).

Would people agree that the Loomio School Beginner/Making decisions section should be a lot shorter (I'm thinking quick presentation of the decisions concept and a bullet list of the different poll types and the situation in which you'd use it) and its current content would better be presented in sub-sections of a Making decisions section replacing the current Proposals sections in the user manual?

If so, I can PR this change in English (across both repos), and work on French translations once the change is merged, but I would rather be sure that's the way the Loomio project wants it before working on this!

@juliencarnot I'm not sure if I agree it should be a lot shorter. I imagine that the kind of people who read a manual at all are the kind of people who are looking for reasonably detailed information. The app is the first manual, if you like, and provides a short, but could be shorter, intro to each of the tools the first time you use them... Going to the manual after seeing that, I would expect that people are looking for a comprehensive introduction.

@robertguthrie I absolutely agree that the app itself and the tooltip should answer most questions, and in my view it does give a lot of info on poll types.
I was under the impression the beginner section of the Loomio School was created to offer a quick onboarding tour and that the user manual would remain a separate section (ie. not in beginner heading) with all the details a power-user could need, but maybe I'm wrong!

Hrrm.. yea. Despite the name "beginner" we don't actually have any more advanced pages on the topics. I'm pretty keen to have a single place we can point to, for someone wanting to learn more than what the app can tell them.

The use case we most commonly have is someone who is new to Loomio (a beginner) but is trying to quickly become an experienced Loomio facilitator or coordinator. This is common for our local government clients who have selected Loomio for a project, but then need to go from 0 to 90% pretty quickly.

OK, sorry I didn't get that both resources were to be merged under a single heading.

It's not easy to represent, but what do you think about this table of contents of Loomio School (compared to the current one) including most pages from the user manual (I've kept the folder/file name visible to indicate the origin of the pages or added a comment if needed)?

Summary

• Introduction
• Learn to use Loomio
  • What is Loomio?
  • Joining a group
    • Navigating Loomio
    • Your user profile
    • Keeping up to date
  • Making decisions (shorter to avoid duplication with sections)
    • Discussion threads
    • Comments
    • Proposals
    • Time poll
    • Check
    • Poll
    • Dot-vote
    • Ranked choice
  • Starting your group
    • Group settings
    • Subgroups
    • Coordinating your group
    • Inviting new members
    • Facilitating discussions
  • Frequently Asked Questions
• Guides & How To's
• Facilitation Guide
  • 1. Preparation
  • 2. Commencing
  • 3. Underway
  • 4. Concluding
  • 5. Ongoing Practice
• Case Studies & User Stories
• Coaching resources
  • Basic Training Workshop
• Inspiration
• Policies & More Info
  • Security FAQ
  • Terms of Service
  • Privacy Policy
  • Third Party Services

Theses pages from the user manual would be dropped/not migrated to Loomio School:
* Introduction (duplicates beginner/index)
* Getting started (duplicates beginner/starting /joining group)
* Pricing (duplicates https://www.loomio.org/pricing)
* Premium Features (duplicates https://www.loomio.org/pricing)

You are like a human aspirin, relieving me of headaches and simultaneously lowering my blood pressure!

I would suggest breaking the 3rd part of Learning to use into into 2 sections: "Discussions" and "Decision tools".

Thanks!

Thanks for the feedback, I'll include your suggestion. I'll finish reviewing the user-manual content in 'en' and 'fr' before, and then see how it should be merged without making too much of a mess. ;-)

In the meantime, if others want to weight in, please do so, especially if you'd like to help on other languages! ;-)

@robertguthrie Robert said you're on the way to restructure the contents of Loomio School. I red the contents about facilitation and I think that your project is very interesting.

As a long time social activist, involved in global movements since 1999, I think that the issue of organization (a new kind of organization) is strategic for all social movements worldwide. That's why I wish to propose you a possible enhancement of your project.

Why not to make a real school on loomio.school?

As you probably know in Spain some social movements started to use e-learning platforms to make courses on social issues. Two examples are the "Fundacion de los Comunes" (Commons Foundation) e-learning platform http://aula.fundaciondeloscomunes.net/ and the "Escola del Comu" (Commons School) e-learning platform of Barcelona en comu https://escoladelcomu.cat/

My proposal is to create an e-learning platform on Loomio School to make (multilingual) facilitation courses and courses about participative social and political organization. Courses could be free and paid and teachers could be the people from Loomio and Enspiral but also international teachers from social movements worldwide. All the actually existing static contents could be integrated into the e-learning platform as some courses' documentation.

Loomio School e-learning platform could become a global hub on facilitation practices.

Yeah great! It turns out that there are lots of tiny details when you start getting into a piece of work like this. Over time Loomio.school might become a 'real school', but right now we do have real training going on in various forms, which are worth pointing out:

Nati and Rich have been running workshops all over the planet.

Various Enspiral people have run Open Enspiral classes in the past.

Susan Basterfield runs Practical Self-Management Intensive

And there are plenty of Enspiral Tales from plenty of people too.

I think the breadth of information already created shows that it might be quite a challenge to make a single resource. We'll just keep focusing on building the app and making the 'getting started' material for now, but I hope we can contribute more to the online learning space in the future

@robertguthrie Could be a great challenge to integrate e-learning facilitation courses with physical workshops. That's exactly how Escola del Comu in Barcelona works. They have online courses with pysical workshops. Could be interesting to associate online courses with the Richard and Nati workshops..