Loomio

Showcase open groups

Sean Tilley PublicSeen by 44

One of the selling points of Loomio is the fact that it can be used as a platform for digital democracy. Currently, it works great for individual projects, but I think that there's a feature that could take things even further.

Use Case

Let's say there's a user on Loomio that likes participating in whatever group they're in, but they want to participate in other groups as well. Traditionally, this would have to boil down to:

  1. Knowing what organizations are using Loomio
  2. Knowing which groups accept open registrations
  3. Joining the group itself, assuming it isn't invisible and closed off.
  4. Participating!

Unfortunately, this feels like a few steps too many.

Group Showcase

Suppose that groups on Loomio could opt-in to a feature where their group can be found via the search function, or some kind of showcase? Suddenly, some interesting new opportunities could open up:

  1. Suddenly, any open group could be made readily available for people to join and voice their opinions about a group and their policies. In a sense, this could be wonderful for collaboration and activism.

  2. Awareness of these different projects is raised.

  3. People on Loomio would be encouraged to participate in more groups that are interesting and relevant to them, so they too could find some way to dive in and work with those projects. Want to voice an opinion about how Firefox or Diaspora or your local art club are doing things?

  4. Groups can be tied to things like topics and localities in order to establish communities related to just about anything, and anyone can participate in the process of open governance.

James Kiesel

Yes yes yes. Encouraging exploration within open groups is a great idea, and will (for some users) vastly increase engagement.

Think Pinterest or Tumblr, where the first thing you see when you get to the site are hundreds of interesting things you've never seen before.

Not saying Loomio should go that route, but definitely nice to have as an option for those with digital wanderlust.

Alanna Irving

This is such a good idea. How would it be implemented in practice? @seantilleycommunit do you have mental mockups in mind?

Sean Tilley

I can whip up some mockups tonight if you'd like. Some inspiration points I can think of would be something along the lines of how IndieGoGo or Kickstarter works when you go to browse something. In a sense things are organized:

  1. By topic (a topic tag?)
  2. By locality (a geo tag?)

In turn, each group would be represented with:

  1. The Title
  2. a thumbnail
  3. Short description
  4. A percentage of users
  5. a join button

As a bonus, maybe it could also show the latest thing being voted on or discussed.

Richard D. Bartlett

I love the way you're thinking about this Sean. Some things to bear in mind, if you want to do mockups:

  • enabling instant join on groups, i.e. removing the need for an admin to approve the request (possibly with moderation to prevent abuse)
  • improving group search, as you've said
  • a manageable system for categorising groups
  • promoting public discussions as well as public groups (we've been sketching out plans for an index of public discussions that's algorithmically sorted for interestingness)
  • making this discoverable, e.g. when do you tell people about public content?
  • group identity: if the group profile had more customisation options, it would really feel like a space you can welcome people into

...so many things we could do!

Sean Tilley

The way I see it, the challenge is finding a happy medium from two very different sources of inspiration:

  1. Crowdfunding sites, as explained earlier. The focus is on projects rather than content related to projects, if that makes sense.
  2. Tumblr, which focuses much more on content than it does necessarily on the identity of projects. One thing that Tumblr is exceptionally good at is showing a piece of content and making it relevant in searches.

The trick is determining what to emphasize:

  1. The group
  2. Content from within the group (posts, voting decisions, most active discussions, etc)

Alternatively, I could think of a few ways that we might be able to represent both, but I imagine it'd take a bit of tinkering to hit that proper balance.

Sean Tilley

Just a very rough sketch, could play around more with it.

Sean Tilley

Could also make use of some kind of tagging to display different categories directly on the project box. In the bottom section, you could easily show the following:

  1. User Count
  2. A location, if set by the group. Otherwise it's "Anywhere".
  3. A short description contrasted against the project's graphic.
  4. A button labeled "Participate"

You could add a lot of polish to that and make a nice discovery portal for all kinds of interesting things. Imagine if some of the email campaigns you get from signing a petition could actually organize and function as groups?

They'd all be represented on a level playing field with all sorts of other organizations and initiatives.

Additionally (I didn't put this in), you could display some Topic tags, which can be done using something like Acts_as_Taggable_On in Rails.