Political use for Loomio

I realize that the link I posted may have seemed like a private invitation to only 2 members. For that reason I have started a separate post to promote this option to anybody who is interested. During the sign up you can choose to be added as an editor or simply to view the files.

collaborative tool testing

I do have to warn you that I have only been at this for a few hours and during that time have identified a number of issues / shortfalls with the software. Thanks to @dnephin for signing up and proving that the form actually works. I will be sending the links and invitations momentarily.

I must warn people that currently it is very much a work in progress but anybody active in this discussion is welcome.

@alandavison Thanks Alan, we're currently developing a new website as well as researching the hows and whys of the actual platform so feedback is great.

In terms of development, I personally think what is really needed is to bring all the different groups working on projects together into one place.

Rather than trying to turn Loomio into a system that can do everything it would be more practical to focus on its niche and really polish that. Meanwhile there are other platforms that perform slightly different functions, which may be more appropriate depending on what it is you wish to achieve.

@lbjoum @alandavison That sounds great about the group. Let us know what they say. Any of the names you have suggested sound fine to me.

If I can please do a basic check to see if we are all on the same page. What exactly are we all talking about here. It has no name, so I will try and spell out what I think we are talking about. I see three main aspects to this idea.

1. An internet based voting platform used by a population to make decisions/choices.

2. The decisions and choices made using the internet tool are be the same as that of the parliament.

3. An elected person in a parliament chooses to vote according to the decisions made in the internet platform - thus connecting the population directly into the parliamentary process.

Aspect 1 needs the most thought. Aspects 2 and 3 don't as much.

A powerful internet based voting method has not emerged yet. If/when it does, I predict it will be a new classification of social media. I am calling it direct democratic media (2DM).
The 2DM platform will mimic the structure of the government. For Australia will mirror the federal, state and local parliaments, each with the subsets of the houses. Each house will have a sub-set for every member of parliament. I call this level of the 2DM the e-polly. If loomio was able to have sub-groups of sub-groups I could build you an example of this structure.
Each level of 'real world' government has a shadow level in the 2DM.

Example: State level has a shadow state level, If the state has 2 houses of parliament there will be 2 shadow levels in the 2DM. If there are 100 members of parliament there will be 100 e-polly positions in the 2DM.
In our existing parliaments the politician is the place where all votes are made; but the M.P. may be part of a group (political party) or independent.

In the 2DM the votes can be collected at the e-polly level and tallied upwards or they can be voted at any other level and passed to each e-polly below carry into parliament. That is - the population could vote as an electorate or they could vote as a shire, state or country.
In the first situation citizens would only be able to cast their vote in the e-polly subset relevant to their electorate. I like this model best because it groups citizens into smaller groups and this would make it easier to do the checks and balances necessary to ensure the system is not being cheated. Like, each person/member/account holder of the 2DM will need to be verified as an eligible voter and real world person and non-duplicate. – but this process is another long discussion. It should also be noted that not every e-polly position will be connected into parliament with an elected person, so this option needs more definition. It is likely that only a small amount of e-polly positions will have elected members of parliament connecting them to government so they would have to carry the decisions of the entire 2DM platform into government. The obvious solution is to tally the votes to the house level and then all the sitting e-pollies would vote according to this outcome. But what if a particular electorate was directly effected by the decision? In this situation the members of that electorate should get a louder voice. I think it would be possible to build in mechanisms to make this possible.
Once you start to get into thinking about the algorithms that describe the 2DM process you see how many parts need to be considered. Like – what about the organisation that hosts the 2DM. If they are free to make all decisions about the way the 2DM is built then they gain positions of power. This is where I admire loomio for inviting all of us to participate in the process, and so I feel this could be done with a 2DM too.
It is great that you all are so interested in this topic but as you can see we do not have a common language to share this concept. As you can see I have developed my own ontology by using the concepts of 2DM and e-polly. But we still need to assign many more names. The whole concept still needs a name. I'm sure there are some good taxonomists (or whatever the skill is called) out there who can help.

@michaelsoth I've never claimed that direct democracy would automatically mean people make rational decisions. Far from it. However, the real question is this: what is more naive - getting people to participate in decisions that affect them or allowing a tiny fraction of people who need to obtain corporate backing to finance their campaigns to make all decisions without real accountability to do so? The former option gives you a chance - the latter is a recipe for disaster. Are people more likely to make decisions in their interests than career politicians who are rarely even aware of the life circumstances of most of their constituents? It would be hard for them not to.
Far from being naive, I think that I've set my own mental bar for "expected outcome" of this experiment a lot lower than most.

By the way, I personally think that widespread therapy would help people make more rational decisions and I think this is actually a very important goal to be pursuing. But again, it will take a long time for that to become widespread enough that we don't have too much irrationality clouding our judgment.

@lbjoum The last time I programmed Java was new (yikes), so I personally have no thoughts at all on the more complex aspects mirroring political structures, however the first bit all sounded good. For myself, my goal is to familiarise people with the idea of internet voting and more constant democratic participation. If I were to be elected, I would formally obligate myself to vote as my constituents desire, as long as participation reaches a certain quorum, which I'm sure would be another difficulty to overcome in the beginning. The vast majority of people do not get very many votes first-time around if they do not belong to a pre-existing party. I actually thought DemocracyOS's showing in Buenos Aires wasn't half-bad. I know people who are MPs now, who started with 1% of votes the first time they ran.

I agree with what you have said @Joum as a starting point.

Although I would personally add two clauses to points 2. and 3.

2: in a hypothetical future where direct democracy has replaced the representative system the current parliament structure is redundant. In a system where every representative is beholden to the same online public poles there is no purpose to a parliament as it currently functions.

3: It is impractical for direct democracy to function in a pure form, even with Internet making communication instant. I would suggest a hybridization with representative democracy - though through a different means than the current model. Instead, using social media style networks anyone could link themselves to another on specific topic to represent them. They would then automatically vote the same way when they did. Rather than holding elections you could change your representatives at any time, and any vote made by the individual would take precedence over a representative vote should the contradict.

I noticed something that can become a problem here. In a group of 10-12 persons discussing about 1 topic, we've generated over 100 comments. What will happen when thousands of persons start reading 1 proposal and giving their opinion about it?
That's why I think we need the representative part in this. People doesn't want to read all the comments to give their opinion. They don't have time for that. So reading comments and updating the original proposal and its abstract demands some structure. The elected may provide it.

The single identification must exist in order to not affect the results. Here in Brazil, we may use Electors ID, used for voting. Also we can think about signing petitions using the same platform.

I like the idea of having a minimum quorum to validate a proposal, once people must understand their importance in the system and motivate other people to also vote. The platform must allow to change that minimum rate.
Also we can give people the "I vote according to my representant" option. But this is risky because people may get lazy with that option. And we want people more participative, and not less.

Thanks for signing up @rorytb I have sent you the links you will need to get started.

@joaomarcelloortega yes I've noticed that too — and found it quite an overwhelming volume of text to keep up with.

In some discussions it can help to put up a proposal to get a snapshot of the group's feelings — because then everyone has a chance to make a short comment with their vote. And anyone can pretty quickly read the list of position statements and get the gist of the discussion.

@lbjoum you said -

A powerful internet based voting method has not emerged yet. If/when it does, I predict it will be a new classification of social media. I am calling it direct democratic media (2DM)

There are already dozens of voting "methods" some of which have been mentioned during the course of this discussion.

It is being argued that the choice of "voting method" should be determined based on the nature of the proposal being voted on, as well as the "outcome criteria" that is to say, what conditions must be met in order for that vote to pass, proceed to another level or require that the proposal be reworked (just a few possible outcomes).

I think what you are really referring to is a "secure voting platform" - a robust, reliable, fault-tolerant, secure, server infrastructure that can scale to cope with very large numbers of "unique" votes (cast on a wide variety of Internet connected devices). Similar to a payment gateway like PayPal or Worldpay but the transactions would be votes, the platform would require similar audit-ability and anti-tampering mechanisms.

Also I don't see collaborative decision making or online voting as a new form of social media and don't think it is helpful to introduce new acronyms into an already overcrowded technology space. 15 or more years ago the term "Alphabet Soup" was coined, the IT industry even created TLA as an acronym for "Three Letter Acronym" because so many were being created on a daily basis.

New tools that emerge to facilitate groups in collaboration and decision making will leverage current and emerging social media to promote, distribute and collect ideas, comments and feedback. This should then be aggregated into a much more flexible collaboration environment where "citizen groups" could do what we are doing here - discuss what we feel is important or relevant.

There still seems to be an emotional response to the use of the word "moderator" and @michaelsoth would say this is a good thing. We need collaborative frameworks that can include emotional elements as part of a human decision making system.

The complexity of this subject, and length of this thread, have become subjects unto themselves. ;) Forgive me for following that tangent a bit farther.

As some have mentioned, long threads are hard to follow and internalize. Actually, one of the things I like most about consensus process, and Loomio, is that people can avoid much of the potential mess associated with official or unofficial summaries.

In majoritarian voting, the quality of 'shared information' is always critically important, because a majority can impose their will upon a minority. In consensus, by contrast, a minority can always be heard. If anyone seems to discard or to accidently overlook a perspective, that minority can speak up.

That doesn't directly help people in crafting fair proposals, but it incentivizes it. Also, it depends on what someone intends with a given proposal. For instance, there's no obligation for any one proposal to cover the entire topic of discussion. Perhaps a group can only agree on one issue related to the topic, at a given time-- if they can agree at all. I don't see any need for people to agree on most things, as long as they can work together on things which are mutually important.

Of course, time's precious, and a good conversation can be held back by a proposal which is inappropriate, or too narrowly focused, or simply not as important as an alternate possibility. So, it's really helpful to try to craft a proposal which is both powerful and has a strong chance of being accepted, through group discussion.

I don't have much experience here, but I think the Loomio team considers it efficient and appropriate for each conversation to have only one proposal at a time. That way, if a problem proposal arises, people are practically 'forced' to deal with it. They can indicate if there's no way that that proposal will ever 'pass', and perhaps ask the creator to discontinue and/or replace it.

In a 'worst case' scenario, there's obviously nothing stopping anyone from starting a new conversation with another proposal related to the existing conversation. That could be divisive, especially if the proposals themselves seem to be in direct competition-- which, in pure consensus process, would surely doom both to failure. However, a second proposal could simply focus on a different aspect of an existing subject.

The 'Ideas' feature should help people to quickly see when an existing proposal is outclassed by any closely related alternatives. https://www.loomio.org/d/5Lxbd4Rs/ideas-proto-proposals

None of the existing mechanics or possible mechanics can create genuine consensus culture, as Loomio developers have mentioned before. I believe they want tools which will simply and clearly facilitate good practices in non-coercive online decision-making. 

It's arguable that I should have created a new thread for following the tangent above-- I just didn't desire to start a new conversation. Anyway, I hope people can follow the political voting discussion here!

@michaelsoth I have created a collaborative workspace for you to develop your ideas and thoughts relating to facilitation as you suggested.

I have downloaded and stored a copy of "The Tyranny of Structurlessness" in the shared folder for reference and also found an interesting link discussing the paper.

Beautiful Trouble - Beware the Tyranny of Structurlessness

The linked site also has other articles that may be of interest to this community. The site tag-line is "A Toolbox for Revolution"

@michaelsoth - the signup link is in my earlier posts

Food for thought from the above mentioned web site

There are as many organizational structures as there are philosophies of collective action. But they virtually all share one thing in common: for better or worse, they acknowledge their own structure, instead of hiding behind unlikely and obfuscating assertions of structurelessness. That acknowledgment, and the accountability it fosters, is the only way to ensure effective and equitable decision-making.

Structurelessness is often mistakenly conflated with absence of hierarchy, when in fact, effective non-hierarchical forms of organizing actually require a great deal of structure. Anyone who has participated in an effectively facilitated general assembly or spokescouncil meeting will well understand this distinction.

by Josh Bolotsky

PS - His website currently has a technical issue that promises to be resolved shortly....

Voting platforms are easy to develop and use. Consensus building on the other hand, is not so easy. I'm hoping we can get Loomio to the point that it's better than it already is at helping build consensus.

Beautiful Trouble - Beware the Tyranny of Structureless

@alandavison Definitely interesting. I think this is more of an issue for organizational structure not necessarily decision making. While I think they are related, they are definitely separate concerns. A good proposal should include "goal" criteria, and identify parties responsible for meeting those goals, which hopefully addresses these problems.

Maybe one way to encourage that is to provide separate fields in a proposal to provide those details (although I'm not sure I'm really a fan of that).

@dnephin I'm actually in favor of fields driven by consensus. A clearly defined problem, goal and then solution. Even the process of creating those is going to be helpful for the communities using the software.

Voting platforms are easy to develop and use. Consensus building on the other hand, is not so easy

While we're on the topic, I've always thought of voting as just the final step in a decision making process. The earlier parts of the process include research, and debate of the trade-offs. I see these earlier steps as almost more important than the final decision. It's what allows us to learn from decisions, and to make better ones in the future. It's also what allows us to understand what the decisions actually mean (if we lose the context, we lose the ability to understand the words, see: "the right the bear arms").

So often in our current systems these critical steps happen very privately, and are almost never publicly available.

I think the most appealing part of loomio (and consensus) is that it encourages the earlier parts of the process to happen in the open. Instead of just registering "yes" or "no", you're almost required to provide more context about your preference. At the very least, some parties, on either side of the debate, are required to provide something. And all of that process is recorded publicly.

I'd personally like to see that part of the process developed further (less of a focus on voting models, more on making the decision process public and accessible). Even if you don't use the consensus model to make the final decision, you benefit from the earlier steps of the process.

@michaelsoth thanks for the feedback and your input.

I feel to some extent we're talking at cross purposes fuelled by misunderstandings.

Perhaps it would be good to try and highlight some of these misunderstandings. I look forward to hearing what you think when you have more time.

I sent you the invitations - perhaps you would like to edit your post and remove the email address?

There has been a lot of discussion on this topic and it can be a bit overwhelming to sort through it to understand the issue properly, which seems to highlight the complexity of this kind of voting/discussion as much as the actual discourse taking place.

Perhaps it would be helpful to create sub-discussions on specific aspects of the issue that could be voted on / discussed individually and then reported to the main thread? It seems like whenever the is a big issue one problem with tackling it is that there are multiple angles involved all at once. If it were possible and efficient to break it into smaller parts then it would be easier to find the key issues that need to be worked on rather than trying take it all in at once.

And this is where I think we can start to look for ways to help improve Loomio. How can this tool be designed to help separate a discussion into smaller, more manageable pieces? What would Loomio need to do?

@adamglickman , I really like that idea generally. I don't personally think in terms of main discussion and sub-discussion, which is a hierarchical view, as if the more specific discussions are subordinate to the broad topic. This is pretty radical of me, although I imagine that some people here relate to it.

I think it's possible for the general topic (say, Loomio in politics) to end up being a general discussion which does not result in any sort of consensus, but which does act as an outstanding brainstorming and creative tool, fueling more specific topics and potential agreements.

@gregorycassel This is my thought as well.

How can this tool be designed to help separate a discussion into smaller, more manageable pieces?

This is exactly the question I'm trying to answer. My proposal from an earlier post in this topic (and also an idea I've been playing with for some time now):

My feeling is that the software tool should handle these concerns. I think that can be accomplished by moving away from a single chronologically ordered list of responses, to a a directed rooted tree (or directed graph) structure.

Discussions can branch freely without requiring extra effort on the participants. As a participant you can subscribe/unsubscribe from the branches you’re interested in. A new participant joining the discussion only needs to follow the branches they’re interested in, which would be a small fraction of the entire discussion. This makes auditing a lot easier as well (for the same reason, it’s easier to find the related posts).

Technically, how would a discussion branch without any effort from the participants? Just curious if this has been implemented elsewhere. @dnephin

@dnephin, I think something like that would be very helpful. I'd like to add to it by suggesting some system by which key results could be displayed more publically "up the chain" so to speak. That way when having a discussion like this one "Political Use..." you could start a discussion and then, depending on how it goes, turn it into a "brainstorming" topic with your top ideas clearly visible without needing to dig into the discussion for a specific post.

@BenBurton, to branch a discussion might be through a quick vote e.g. Proposal: Branch from this post to "Political Uses Brainstorming session". Then that post would serve as a starting point for the branch under a new topic.

From a functional perspective I would think some combination of a wiki or survey capability might help to keep the discussion clear though it might be necessary to only have certain functions available for specific types of branches (brainstorming vs direct voting). Anyone could obviously create a new branch if they didn't like the restriction but it might keep the goal clear.

I don't know of anything that does it right now, it's something I've been experimenting with 1, 2, 3

It's definitely a bit of a challenge. Responses would have parents, so instead of a view being all posts chronologically, you would have multiple child responses per post, formating a directed graph.

Views would be a either:
1. a single path from root to leaf, of which there would be many
2. just immediate context around a given response (including immediate parent, the origin section from the root topic, and immediate child posts)

@dnephin , I've been thinking that Loomio already easily allows for discussions to become more focused, simply by creating a more specific topic and inviting people to it. Of course, there is some risk of mess-- there's always some risk of mess-- but this feels more organic to me than creating a nested structure. A nested structure can be very efficient and effective, but it is a hierarchical structure. If a group of people are genuinely acting freely, without coercion or formal constraints, then they can create focal points according to their varying desires for shared focus and shared meaning.

For instance, if I created some other thread related to this topic, people could choose to either engage or not engage, according to the perceived value of my 'related topic'. Someone else might create an alternate topic which is more interesting. Neither topic would be subordinate to this topic.

If a group is genuinely operating according to shared interests, then any tendency towards an explosive 'mess' of topics could be addressed and dealt with collectively. For instance, people might informally agree not to create new 'related topics' without getting a certain number of 'likes' for a given comment, or perhaps even having an actual poll ('Decision') for the new topic creation.

And of course, people can always informally encourage others to not engage in an extraneous topic. In the future, I'm hopeful that an archiving feature will become available, per this recent discussion: https://www.loomio.org/d/HaE6ux1C/archiving-discussions?proposal=138XCcDa

@dnephin

How can this tool be designed to help separate a discussion into smaller, more manageable pieces?

As you know this is something that I have been working on as well, I have introduced some initial thoughts in the LiveMinutes project folder.

For anybody else interested in testing other software tools, cel.ly is an alternative social network, group discussion tool introduced by a new member to the loomio community who is a developer of cel.ly that already implements some features that would be useful to Loomio discussions.

I’d like to add to it by suggesting some system by which key results could be displayed more publicly “up the chain”

I agree, I was also thinking that extra activity on a branch would be a signal that the branch was important, so you're able to discover these important branches very organically without human intervention.

Another aspect of the system is that each post requires some "position" on the previous post. "accept", "support", "challenge", "oppose", etc. That way a post with many accept/support is immediately visible. Things with lots of challenges need more research.

@gregorycassel

For instance, if I created some other thread related to this topic, people could choose to either engage or not engage, according to the perceived value of my ‘related topic’.

I think this assumes that everyone is approaching a topic with the same understanding. I think often enough a proposal happens and it takes time for everyones understanding to coalesce. Having to create a new topic, and lose all the valuable context would be a shame.

Neither topic would be subordinate to this topic.

I wouldn't think of my post as subordinate to your post, just becomes it's coming after. It's simply a reply in a chain of communication. It's the same in a graph. Anyone is free to create a new branch from the top level, or from any point in the graph. None are subordinate to another, they are simply responses to previous comments.

The last 11 posts, although interesting are not directly related to "Political use for Loomio" and are actually "functional requirements" for any software tool trying to order the chaos that is linear group discussion.

What we are doing here could be done in any standard online Forum.

@alandavison I will have to check that out as well. I still owe you a response about liveminutes. I need to take some more time to look at what it offers.

@gregorycassel

And of course, people can always informally encourage others to not engage in an extraneous topic.

I don't see these branches as extraneous topics at all. It's simply a different perspective on the problem. I think it actually enriches the discussion by including these different perspectives. The challenge is being able to include them without everyone losing focus of the different threads.

In reality I think I'm just trying to create a better model for what is the natural way we communicate. As someone talks (or posts) we may different thoughts about each thing they say. Being able to respond to each individually allows us to focus in on specifics much faster.

The last 11 posts, although interesting are not directly related to “Political use for Loomio” and are actually “functional requirements” for any software tool trying to order the chaos that is linear group discussion.

What we are doing here could be done in any standard online Forum.

Correct. This is why I think of Loomio as a forum with high powered consensus based voting. It's a good start, but I think the requirements for what it wants to do could be better laid out.

Loomio wants to be software that helps communities make decisions. I hope we can help push it down that path with more accurate requirements.

@adamglickman A proposal to branch is a great idea.

@dnephin - I introduced cel.ly here because they use hashtags to highlight posts and have voting and polling mechanisms. I haven't tested it yet because I just installed it and don't have a group to participate in yet.

It also allows @me tagging to create personal notes

@dnephin

I don’t see these branches as extraneous topics at all. It’s simply a different perspective on the problem.

And this is one of the issues. If Loomio would help people clearly define a problem, it would also help them keep a discussion on track or set up a divergent thread to discuss a different portion of a problem.

@dnephin I wasn't referring to anything here as extraneous, but rather, the generic possibility of people creating extraneous topics and/or proposals in a group without a structured conversational hierarchy. My apologies for lack of clarity.

@alandavison , I agree that this thread could happen in any forum, although I don't blame that on Loomio. I think that's simply what we are doing here. It probably reflects the fact that 'Loomio in politics' is an extremely broad subject, upon which few of us may entirely agree.

@gregorycassel you said

I’ve been thinking that Loomio already easily allows for discussions to become more focused, simply by creating a more specific topic and inviting people to it.

If you check out the posts from @lbjoum you will see that it hasn't worked for SOL. One of the issues they have is too many empty sub-topics or sub-groups. In their case discussion has become more fractured rather than focused and participation in group discussion has diminished.

There will, without doubt be a specific discussion, topic or forum for "requirements" and there is certainly a specific topic for "feature requests"

Does anybody here have any experience with "Brainstorming" or "Mind Mapping" software?

@BenBurton you said

How can this tool be designed to help separate a discussion into smaller, more manageable pieces? What would Loomio need to do?

myself and @dnephin have pointed out a few ideas already, wary of course that this is not the correct thread for this discussion. We are actively researching this area and will be working together to test some other software tools and report back on our findings.

@alandavison , I strongly support providing one or more tools for dealing with empty sub-topics and empty subgroups. I believe that the (hoped for) Archiving feature, which I mentioned before, would deal nicely with inactive 'sub-topics' (or inactive topics of any sort.) Loomio has also been recently discussing ways of dealing with abandoned subgroups, per https://www.loomio.org/d/hwJpfkeN/parent-group-ability-to-remove-sub-group?proposal=tY9zwWmF

I think there are many ways to do such things, with or without a technically hierarchical format.

@dnephin , you wrote

I think this assumes that everyone is approaching a topic with the same understanding. I think often enough a proposal happens and it takes time for everyones understanding to coalesce. Having to create a new topic, and lose all the valuable context would be a shame.

One of my main personal concerns is actually the fact that no one ever, in my opinion, approaches any topic with the same understanding(s). I think that a consensus decision-making tool can help lots, without creating a hierarchy of related topics. However, I'm not opposed to the provision of such a technical tool, if others are interested in it, and if the Loomio team or some open source derivative are willing and able to develop it.

As far as related proposals go, I think that the upcoming Ideas tool will help to funnel interests on that front. Ideas will be connected to an active proposal, as alternatives to it. I think this can help people to avoid getting too fragmented in their discussions. It really does require work on consensus process and communication, though. For instance, if some 'Idea' looks popular and an active proposal is going nowhere, people will need to learn how to constructively confront that problem.

@gregorycassel at this stage we will have to agree to disagree, my experience is that creating multiple discussion threads does not produce focus, especially if the threads are like this one, long, complex, chronological posts.

I just realized that I've engaged extensively in more of the tangent here which isn't really about Loomio+politics at all. I would like to personally stop doing that. I would encourage anyone including @dnephin , @alandavison to create another topic on the subject of 'sub-topics', or anything else fundamental to Loomio. (I'm not trying to 'get the last word in' either, haha; I'm just indicating what I think would be best here, at some point.)

@dnephin, @BenBurton, @gregorycassel, @adamglickman

Here is an example of one group using votebot for voting (suprisingly)

openpolitics.org voting

clicking on the title link for a specific "vote item" leads to github to discuss and fork proposals.

The Open Democracy Stack

Another interesting blog post from James Smith, the Open Politics, Something New candidate ...

Conclusion
The world of Open Democeacy is one with many pieces, and how they all fit together isn’t necessarily obvious at the first look. Anyone who wants to contribute to this (including myself) should understand the ‘stack’ to know which ideas fit where.

And of course, all this could be wrong, it’s just my assessment of it. If anyone wants to enlighten me further, please do, and please contribute to all the open democracy efforts that are out there, at whatever level you feel is most appropriate for you.

open democracy stack

Going back to topic about ways to branch a discussion, we could learn something from the web here. It keeps the original content and use hyperlinks for more related content. Readers can choose to stay or to move to a new one more insteresting.
While reading the comments above I imagined something like: "This conversation has a new branch about 'X'. Click here to move to this new discussion." or "@joao created a new conversation about 'X'."
This could be inserted by anyone right beside the paragraph when the topic split.

None of the people in the group have objected.
https://www.loomio.org/g/GRQl4yUT/global-direct-democracy-working-group
I will give people another week but I would say we can use this loomio group if we want. If the people from this thread want to join the page I will make you coordinators.

@lbjoum It's a public group, so not sure how to 'join' the page?