API to import / export / synchronize groups and teams with other tools on the internet

In a world of interconnected services, this data is ideally hold by a seperate microservice with its own local governance. In the context of Enspiral's Open App Ecosystem, there is at least Holodex.is approaching this possible future. Many of these pods could then be linked to form an even broader community.

So I guess the main role of such a feature would be to easily say "All members of group BananaEnthusiasts on tool A should be added to group BananaEnthusiasts on tool B, if they have an account there."?

What if I use both services for various purposes but only want to be associated with BananaEnthusiasts on one of them? The merits of delicious yellow fruit notwithstanding, I wouldn't want to enforce a mapping of that nature without input from each user.

Sharing the requisite information could be a privacy nightmare. It could lead to an undesired revelation of identity, or associate someone's identity publicly with a group that they prefer not to advertise their membership in.

There IS value in exchanging that kind of information between applications, I totally agree on that concept.

Where it gets tricky is when the information gets passed between organizations or across administrative domains. Consider what happened when Google acquired YouTube and wanted to force-map all the YouTube accounts to G+ accounts? It wasn't a simple process even though they had direct access to both databases, because many of the YouTube users did not want to create G+ accounts at all.

In the end I think the most reasonable places to use this kind of functionality are organizations that run private servers of several types for internal use and want to synchronize them. But if each of the services is being run by the same entity, they already have access to all the databases so what would be better than an API would simply be a conversion tool that works directly with the databases.

It is certainly a key point for a tool like Loomio not to be isolated, but we may begin with a higher point of view: what would be the profitable connections for Loomio and/or the other tool? And by the way, which tool?

Or more pragmatically: is there anyone who has a specific need we can start with? If yes, can we tell the user story? Do we need to post Loomio comments on Facebook or to post Facebook comments on Loomio?

Then the solution may not be to have an API, but to use one, or something else.

We've had a tremendously positive response to our slack integration, and I expect that more platform integration will be on the way as we move a bit further away from the 1.0 launch.

Check this out: https://medium.com/enspiral-tales/doing-more-together-together-seeding-a-collaborative-technology-alliance-82243ea30d41

Over the past few months there have been many discussions about integrating Loomio with a whole range of other apps; CiviCRM, Diaspora, EtherPad,Slack
and more general discussions about allowing aspects of Loomio to be embedded within other apps. Each of these threads contains some discussion of the need for a standardized protocols/APIs for each kind of data sharing social web apps need, in order to reduce the boulder-of-Sysyphus task of manually integrating every other app an app's users also use.

Is anyone familiar with the Open Web Foundation? They created some legal agreements, analogous to free code software licenses, for releasing all rights to standards/ protocols, thus making them guaranteed "open" (or "free" or "libre" or whatever ;) They were set up a few years ago, not sure if they're still active. Their intention was to act as an incubator for experimental standards, and thus reduce the churn of proposed standards going through other standards bodies like the W3C and the IETF.

Hi, I can offer a real world use case I think.

My organisation has a CRM as part of our public website which in turn synchronises with MailChimp for sending out mailings, paypal for subscriptions etc.

As a (paid) membership organisation we would like to be able to synchronise things so that all members are automatically members of our forum - and cease to be if they leave the organisation. Ideally we'd also want single sign on so signing into our website would also sign user into the forum.

We are experimenting with Loomio as a forum, so in the case we would want a way to sync our membership with Loomio.

Why, oh why are you using MailChump? A decent CRM can do mail-outs itself (I know CiviCRM can for example), without giving away all your users' personal data to a corporation. If you really do need some of the specific features MailChump, the OER Foundation have used Mautik as a free code replacement.

EDIT: added bit about Mautik

does Loomio now allow automatic registry of anyone with a @[domain.name] email?

Sorry, I don't quite follow that, @coopchange ; what do you mean? We do have rate limiters in place to prevent mass sign-ups.