Loomio

Loomio

Project 2012-04-17 00:58:30 +1200

Collab Project with Enspiral

Enspiral is a collective of social benefit companies structured as a network of talented developers, designers, strategist, communicators and other professional services providers sharing resources and doing work together to help create a more equitable, harmonious and sustainable world and workplace.

What-io?
Loomio is a free open-source web application that helps groups make better decisions together. It's designed to suit any kind of group, from businesses to community groups to government. A team of more than a dozen of us have been donating our time to this project for the last 3 months because we strongly believe that the idea has tremendous significance, with the potential to make all organisations more democratic and participatory. We are operating on a not-for-profit and open-source basis. We’re motivated by a desire to spur positive social change in our local, national, and global community.

Mockup

Features
Loomio takes a messy online discussion, and focuses it towards a clear outcome that satisfies everyone in the group. In its current state, decisions are made using the following process:

• A group member suggests a specific proposal.
• The members of the group discuss the pros and cons of the proposal, going into as much detail as necessary.
• Each member of the group gives a short statement summing up their view, and clicks a button to indicate their position (yes, no, abstain, block - or other definitions defined by the group).
• As the discussion progresses, the proposal is modified to try to turn all the No’s into Yes’s.

Benefits
Making decisions in this way has a lot of benefits for all kind of groups:

• Participation: this process is really simple and straightforward, so it is easy to get everyone in the group to engage with the discussion. By engaging everyone, the true potential of the group can be reached.
• Focus: having the proposal at the top of the screen keeps the group discussions focussed and on topic.
• Brevity: the concise summary statements are a quick way to get an accurate overview of any problems that individual members may have with the given proposal, so those problems can be rapidly addressed.
• Doing everything online means you don’t have to spend all day in interminable meetings, and you can work across distances and time zones and enable busy people to be involved, too.

Future
In addition to this basic process, we have a lot of features in mind to improve Loomio even more. These will allow Loomio to scale up both in terms of the scope of discussions it can facilitate, and the number of participants that can be productively engaged, while still maintaining coherence and efficiency. We want to use software to express the magic that happens when everyone puts their heads together and comes up with an idea better than any one person could have done on their own. We also have lots of ideas for ways of visualising groups’ data to help them better understand themselves, and make even better decisions.

And if you’ve ever been involved with a group decision-making process you’ve probably got some ideas for how to make things work more smoothly too - we want to hear from you!

Users
Loomio is already being used by several groups, including Enspiral (a social enterprise incubator), the Open Source Community Gallery, and BuckyBox (a social enterprise building software for organic food distribution networks). Development of the tool is guided by the needs of the users, with a focus on simplicity every step of the way. Our goal is to develop Loomio to the point where we can bring on even more groups of users and incorporate their feedback, too.

Team
Loomio is currently being developed by a passionate team of volunteers in their spare time. The Loomio team includes community workers, business people, artists, programmers, activists and academics. This diversity means we're making a tool that's useful to all kinds of different groups. In fact, we originally came together because we realized our very different organizations actually had similar needs when it came to decision-making: we all wanted to maximize participation and fairness without sacrificing efficiency.

Help!
Right now we're asking for a few thousand dollars to allow a couple of our core team members to focus on this project full-time for two months without starving. Our goal for this stage is to get the software ready for a public beta (meaning, ready for you to use!). For Loomio to live up to its potential, it needs the input of lots of enthusiastic people. We’ll use any funding we receive to get the software to a point where we can handle all of this input effectively.

If you want to stay up to date with the project, you can follow us on Twitter and Facebook,or read our blog. Feel free to email us at [email protected] for more information.

Coders: you can find out more about the open source project at loomio.org

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