Number of users in a group

Well there is a feature that could help to manage larger group decisions and it is the possibility to rank comments and those ranked highly could be on top of the rest, just like this software http://www.question2answer.org/sites.php that could help to manage larger groups. Also the autojoin (no registering process needed) will help to broaden the groups.

IMHO. The tool should handle this. Providing a good exhibition.

In a discussion with limit of participant can limit all the discussion, because the fast guys will participate instead other with better ideas.

My English is sux, I know that :)

Interesting that at the moment group engagement is very good in the largest groups we have. I agree that we should be working on features that make larger groups more effective though

In the next couple of days I was going to run a model on optimum group size and other factors which correlate with engagement. I'll report back to this discussion on my findings.
But to restate Vivien's point, the largest groups have the best engagement. I think this is because there's a critical mass of activity to 'pull 'people in, but I agree that this can be overwhelming.

I wonder how the number of subgroups a group has affects engagement?

I'm not sure (maybe @simontegg can verify) but I suspect Loomio users activity follows a power law distribution, where a small percentage of users represent most of the activity.

It's interesting to keep in mind that there are different types of "engagement" - some more obvious than others. For example, the user who rarely comments, but often reads the discussions and chimes in at key moments with important ideas. Or the user who never comments but notices when things are getting heated and speaks to people personally behind the scenes (on or offline) and brokers compromises. Or someone who doesn't enter most discussions, but is very active on the subject matter where they are an expert. It's not only the "loudest" people that make valuable contributions.

In order to have a diversity of personality types and perspectives, sometimes it's better to have a large group, even if only a small percentage are very active in an obvious way.

I think it is our role to make conversations with a lot of people possible. At a time when thousands of people can Occupy a place and make decisions together, I think Loomio should enable even more people to do so.

The challenge is to develop the software so that the discussions is still possible with that many people (when it usually fails in large real-life public gatherings)

When you have a big group with just a few very active people, you've got BUROCRACY. Just very active people can follow the arguments. Big groups need liquid democracy.

@yagoabati I wonder if you can explain what is the problem you've seen on Loomio that makes you think limits are necessary? And/or what are the qualities you think liquid democracy (i.e. vote delegation) would contribute to the platform?

First of all @richarddbartlett :) I don't want to limit loomio group members i just what to debate around "effective number of users".
I understand discussions are not practical with infinity users. If you start a discussion and then you have 8 comments, that's affordable. If you have 25 it starts to be difficult to manage and if you have 75 that's really impossible.
If you have 100 members and just 25 participate that's not cool. Only "very active people" are taking part in decisions: that's bureaucracy, that's not representative.
From my point of view Loomio is very usefull for groups of "active people" around 3 to.. 40? just as normal assemblys.
For more people i prefer mixed systems with delegation.
:) some thing between "Loomio" and "Agora Voting".

@richarddbartlett there is no problem with Loomio. I love loomio. But i want to understand the limits. I know people don´t like limits but i think is very usefull to know where limits... to fight against them! :). I'm shure there is a limit of people where everything gets impossible to manage. That's the question!!!

Please we need multiple options!! :) (not always ..Yes, No, abstain) :)

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@yago there are lots of problems with Loomio, it is our job to figure them out together and make it better :)

I don't necessarily agree that 25 participants out of a group of 100 is a 'bureaucracy'. For me the important thing is that people have the option to engage meaningfully with the decision-making process. To me, enforced participation is not much better than enforced disenfranchisement.

In fact, in a highly-functioning group, low engagement can indicate a high degree of trust between the members. That doesn't mean you want to remove the non-active members!

I agree that there is a natural limit to the size of an effective horizontal organisation, but I don't feel like it is a problem I've seen in any Loomio groups yet.

@yagoabati If you ask our PP-DE friends LqFB has become totally unmanagable. Indeed they are looking for a new platform right now that would be able to manage over then 10.000 party affiliates.

Exactly the same will happen with Agora Voting.

Plus, personally I'm against any form of delegation of vote. Especially In Spain people have to be educated to participate in democracy and not continue with the bad habit of thinking "What the heck someone will vote for me"

It is this attitude that helped actual spanish politicians to be in control of what they call "Democracy"

even with a large number of users, Loomio shows discussion summary and decision at the top of the page so new joiners have information needed for a vote without needing to read all comments. And the votes are aggregated by the pie chart. one question which I have for a long time regarding all systems is how comments and replies can be aggregated more efficiently and linked to each other.

@richarddbartlett "In fact, in a highly-functioning group, low engagement can indicate a high degree of trust between the members." yes and also can indicate a high degree of boredom among members who do not participate. or also can indicate that many members don't have time to follow the debate, etc... How can we know why people don't participate.
I'm not speaking about a teoretical question. In equo we have been using our own tool called equomunidad (a short of social net) and most of people have abandoned becouse of this two reasons i have told you.

@richarddbartlett "I agree that there is a natural limit to the size of an effective horizontal organisation, but I don't feel like it is a problem I've seen in any Loomio groups yet."
That's normal! Active people don't usually feel there is a problem about that. They usually think passive people don't speak because they are agree with them (false). I'm going to tell you a story that happened in my "horizontal" assembly in Madrid: there was a debate to limit comments to a finite number o words (in our equomnunidad). Two very active persons were against that normative. There were an open debate and these two guys spoke a lot so finally we thought our group was against this normative. After the debate we voted and just these two guys were against the normative. That illustrates the empowerment of active people (burocratas we called them) .

@yagoabati I have no experience with equomunidad so I can't judge where its problems lie. There are so many factors that contribute to a group's rate of participation: some of them are about technology and some about culture.

I don't believe we could predict all the problems that a group might face, and then plan the perfect system from the ground up. My hope for the Loomio design process is that we identify the most pressing problems, and fix them one by one, always guided by the principle of 'making it easy for anyone to participate in decisions that affect them.'

Autonomy means people can participate or not, as they like. Accessibility means everyone has the opportunity to participate.

I wonder what the most pressing problem is for Loomio right now?

I'm nor speaking about disenfranchisement or limiting... I'm speaking about changing ways of managing groups with different orders of magnitudes.

@richarddbartlett I'm sorry .. i don't what to loose your time. It's true that this is not the most pressing problem. For me is just a very important question that has to be with bigger groups. Loomio for the moment is working with smallers groups. :) Thanks!

@yagoabati I don't believe this is a valid proposal. You could propose that "The rules should change when the number of users exceeds 30". However, in my view you should first discuss how the rules should change when the numbers exceed 30... outline your problem and your solution. This might induce constructive debate.

@yagoabati we believe in empowering groups to use Loomio in the best way for them. They can make decisions about who to put in their group, when exactly the the positions mean (such as block), what level of participation they expect, etc. Number of people per group is exactly the same. If a group thinks limiting the number of people is a good idea, they can create subgroups with limited numbers. I don't see the point in limiting the software for everyone because groups can already implement this if they chose using the software as it is now. It's up to groups to make their own choices about how to use Loomio.

Could you please close this proposal and reformulate it so that it actually becomes a proposal @yagoabati?

Hey @yagoabati I don't think this proposal needs more time. Would you move the closing date up, or is it OK if I do it?

Is there a limit of number of users in a group ?

On the FAQ section, it show a 1000 users limitation but it's not clear that a group can have more than that.

I'm pretty sure there is no maximum size for a Loomio group. However, there is a limit on how fast you can send invitations out (to stop people using Loomio as a spam generator).

Hi Richard,

due to the FAQ note, some of our members are very afraid that Loomio will stop to work if there are more than 1.000 users.

https://loomio.gitbooks.io/manual/content/en/frequently_asked_questions.html

Do you have any evidence or proof that Loomio can handle more than that ?

There is no limit to number of members you can have in a group. As a developer on Loomio, I can confirm this. There used to be a limit, it was a real pain, so we removed it.

There is a rate limiter, which prevents a user from preforming actions (like sending many invitations, or creating many groups) at robot speed, but that should not affect real people.

Hi Robert, thanks a lot for your attention.

I trust your affirmative as well Richard statement. But there are some guys on our group that is trying to delegitimize Loomio based on this written documentation. As I am a huge defender of Loomio usage, I am trying to convince them that there is no such limitation.

Is it possible to remove this reference from the FAQ page ?

Hi Josir! If you need any help on talk about Loomio to your community, since we live at the same city we can do it together during some meeting when we have the time to attend.