brain dump from Econsensus comparison
Tom Lord PublicSeen by 41I'm aware that lumping things together isn't possibly the most useful, however I didn't want to swamp this group with loads of topics, and I wanted to make this info available now, seeing as we have it!
We did a quick run through comparing Econsensus and Loomio. In a lot of cases we thought we had things to learn and talk about from the way Loomio does things. There were also some things that we thought Loomio might benefit from, or we wondered about - maybe you've discussed most of these already, just wanted to post them in case you hadn't! These may belie our lack of understanding so far, and obviously no offense intended in asking a whole bunch of questions about functionality :-)
Maybe I've mentioned some of these issues in other posts elsewhere - I'm just going to dump things from our list here for completeness, in no particular order. If anyone wants this in another format then please shout or feel free to DIY!
On the home page, when looking at the list of live topics - could there be more distinction made between proposals and discussions? Maybe people more used to the system find it easy to distinguish... Might be useful to allow filtering of e.g. only proposals, discussions, or order by creation / other dates, participation level, etc. to bring the list down to a manageable size for larger orgs, and aid search.
Do groups ever want to undo a decision's "made" status? How are decisions changed - make another one "over the top of" the existing one?
If it's presumably more flexible to not require a deadline, do you see an advantage in making it mandatory (especially seeing as decisions are set to "made" once the time runs out, as above) ? Interested to hear how people find using this.
We presume that when groups get to having made e.g. 100 decisions, the current pop-up fixed view of previous decisions is going to get tricky. Are you planning to move these into some sort of search-able and/or sortable, or paginated format?
Sounds like you're already talking about an 'archive' - we think the distinction between decisions that were actively made, and e.g. decisions that ran over time and no concrete actions came out of, is important to help reduce the number of results on the screen when looking at previous decisions.
Do any groups write up meeting minutes using Loomio? E.g. from face-to-face meetings? How do you do it, create a discussion and then create a decision that has already closed? Feels a little bit like you have to trick the system to let you do this :-) We allow standalone decisions, although we've talked about restricting the system to force decisions to EITHER come from meetings, or online discussions. If we wanted to get distracted, we think that Meetings then could spawn off into their own modular meeting record / planning tool, with dates, maps, attendees, templates for agendas etc.
We find that being able to respond to proposals and discussions by email is nice occasionally. We find it's not overly used, and sometimes. Be interesting to try this with a bigger user base - my guess is that some very technical and some much less technical people might feel comfortable with emailing.
Obviously responsive design for small screens might be nice. Site looks pretty good on my mobile though!
Running without Javascript results in broadly the same usage but with a few UI differences - is it intentional to provide a non-Javascript-dependent system, and these are just minor bugs to be ironed out, or are you aware of some stuff that relies on Javascript? Not sure how big the non-Javascript use case is... However people suffering from bandwidth issues could turn off Javascript to help with this, so if the site works without it, that's an option for more technical users. Also reduces reliance on various browser compatibility.
We find that allowing inline replies to conversations of just a single level helps to keep conversations a bit more on track. Because of the limited width given to discussions in Loomio, I can already feel myself getting a bit lost in some threads that fire off in different directions (I am probably guilty of this too :-) - maybe allowing the conversation to be expanded would help too.
Would be nice to see the ability to extract all of an organisation's viewable data from Loomio. Helps keep data in the hands of the users.
I really like Loomio's sub-group functionality, it feels clean and easy to me. Any plans to allow more than one sub-group level for larger organisations and networks, to future proof for the scenario where we start winning? :-)
Hey there @tomlord, great to hear your feedback! I'm one of the developers on Loomio. Definitely been thinking about a lot of this stuff myself. Here's some quick answers off the top of my head.
Yep... been thinking about this in our brainstorm for the future dashboard and group page.
Yeah, just make another decision over the top of the other one. It seems to be the simplest easiest way of preserving history.
The mandatory deadline seemed to evolve organically over time (decisions didn't use to require a deadline). It seems to have a few advantages. One, it keeps things moving forward so that decisions don't stagnate. Two, it allows you to put extra emphasis on decisions whilst they are happening (e.g. moving them to the top of the discussion list), since you know they won't stay there forever.
Definitely. That popup box sucks. We plan to move decision way closer to the forefront of the app and also make them easier to search/index.
Interesting... that makes sense. I hadn't thought about that myself until now.
We haven't really been using Loomio to archive in-real-life decisions, but it is definitely a use-case that we've heard talked about. One senior Ruby developer we know even talked about making a plug-in to Loomio for this type of "recorded decision".
Email integration is moving high up on our priority list. Agree that it is very crucial for particular types of users, especially the type you mentioned. =) Some people will refuse to use the tool if they have to go to a separate website.
Definitely another priority for us.
We haven't made a decision on whether or not we will support no-JS yet. I think we might want to eventually support no-JS, but I'm not sure if it's worth the resources to try and fully support it right now. Not sure...
Yes.... definitely. It's coming. =)
Agreed, this is also on the priority list.
Probably inevitable... will probably wait until there is a bit more whining though, based on all the other stuff on this list we gotta get through! =)
Hope this provides some insight. Great to hear your thoughts. Thanks so much!!
Thanks for the detailed feedback!!
All makes sense, and I'm not surprised to see that a lot of this is already on your radar, I don't think we're saying anything particularly novel here.
One thought that comes up is that, if you move towards a "recorded decision" use case, showing results from multiple discussions at the same time, then something like being able to "archive" a decision seems like it will be needed alongside that, to be able to show when a decision is actually "not a decision", or has been replaced by a newer decision as you describe here (as opposed to multiple agreed decisions coming out of one discussion, which don't replace one another) .
The only other thing we mentioned and I didn't put in here, and I don't have any concrete immediate steps on at the moment, is on the low-bandwidth front - and I see this discussion is going on elsewhere too.
Keep up the good work! :-)
Wow, this is super useful Tom, thanks! Great to have it all in one place.
I'll be digesting this for the next few days and thinking about how to best integrate this feedback into our design thinking. Will also try to answer some of your questions.
Thanks!