Loomio

Data portability and Loomio member size limit reasons

Free Akal Takht PublicSeen by 292

Hi Richard,

We are considering hosted Loomio platform as a consensus building tool. However we have few concerns.

  1. What is the policy on the ownership and availability of data in a portable format if we for some reason decide to to move on from hosted Loomio?
  2. In somewhere in the FAQ, I saw the mention of hosted Loomio being a good solution for groups of a thousand members. Is that perceived as a tech limitation (number of hits/minute the servers will perform for) or a workflow problem (too many proposals to arrive at consensus)? We eventually would have a lot more number of participants, so we would need to plan accordingly.

Thanks again for reaching out. In out preliminary run, we have found loomio self-explanatory and wonderful tool.

Richard D. Bartlett

Data portability

You can find the official privacy policy here. (If you're interested, you can see how the privacy policy is developing over here.)

There's currently no explicit functionality to export data from one Loomio instance and import it into another. We do offer a paid service for a small number of commercial customers where we periodically export their data so they can archive it according to their requirements, but this export format it is not designed to be imported into another Loomio instance.

@jameskiesel or @robertguthrie can confirm this for me, but as I understand it, the rapid development currently underway on the Loomio API means we are closer to import/export functionality. Is that right? In my imagination at least, the API lets you read and write data to and from the database, so it shouldn't be too much of a challenge for someone in the open source community to build an importer?

Maximum group size

This has come up a few times lately, most recently here.

The short answer is, yeah it is a workflow problem rather than a technical one. There is no technical limit to the size of a group (the FAQ was out-of-date info about this). If you have further questions about that, it might be best to continue it on in that recent thread, to keep it all in one place :)

Thanks for reaching out! The Free Akal Takht project is so inspiring! I hope Loomio can help somehow!

James Kiesel

Hm, the Loomio API would be a step in the right direction, and an importer / exporter based on it would certainly be an interesting project, but I'm not totally sure you'll be able to get absolutely everything transferred in this way (read counts for each user strike me as a particular rough point.)

When you say 'move on from hosted loomio', do you mean going from a group on loomio.org to a self-hosted instance on freeakaltakht.org (or something else)?

Robert Guthrie

I think that if you were really tried, then you could write a script that pulled all the good stuff, discussions, comments, proposals, votes, memberships and import it into another Loomio instance.

You might need to write a special endpoint that gave you email addresses for users, as those are not included in api responses for privacy reasons.

You would miss out on stuff like "who read what discussions" but don't think that's critical. I think with normal API responses plus the info mapping user ids and email addresses, then you'd be ok.

I would be happy to support any developer in their efforts to write such a script.