Communication can make or break any team or organization’s efforts. Save time, email confusion, and energy with higher quality conversations that move to action. Loomio’s discussion threads can help.

Making decisions with other people can be slow, expensive and emotionally draining, while coordinating team member schedules can be time-consuming. At the same time, making decisions without involving others can turn out to be equally — if not more — expensive and stressful, and can cause resentment amongst those who were not included.

In a self-managed company, everyone is a decision-maker. You need an effective process that enables group input while empowering individuals to act – and effective tools for running it.

Guardian journalist Max Opray got in touch with us last week, while researching his article Could Online Democracy Lead To Governance By Trumps and Trolls? Online interactions are notorious for being hijacked by trolls, so he wanted to hear how we handle trolls at Loomio.

Organisations that adopt Holacracy often find it’s a big upgrade to their decision-making processes. But implementing Governance meetings is only the beginning of your self-management evolution.

New Zealand recently tightened up health and safety laws. Now businesses must have practices that give their workers opportunities to participate, on an ongoing basis, in improving health and safety.

So, your group is actively using Loomio for discussions and decisions. Great! Now you’re ready to optimise your collaboration experience. There are some simple things you can do to make important information clear and accessible. Here are some useful tips and tricks we’ve learned from different Loomio groups.

Did you know? It's easy to create an icon for Loomio, or any other website you use often, on your phone’s home screen. It works a lot like all your other apps – even if the service doesn't offer a native mobile app.

Since Loomio first launched, the team has been fielding requests from clients to help make the tool and collaborative processes work for them. In response, Loomio has offered consulting Services that discover needs, identify changes to work processes, and coach key team members to understand the magic and the practicality of Loomio’s mission: “Enabling everyone to have a say in decisions that affect them”.

If you’ve read the introductory guide to making great decisions with Loomio, you’re ready to learn about some of the creative ways you can use proposals.

Here in the Loomio team, we have been using Loomio since it was only a pie graph with buttons, and we've learnt a few things along the way.

Working efficiently as a group is complex. Part of the puzzle is to find a balance between in-person meetings  and online collaboration.

This is the first article in our Cultural Technology series, where we share practices for working in a networked organisation. This is very much a work in progress but we hope it’s valuable to share what we’re learning.

Ever failed at getting your team engaged with new technology? We have. Like many other people, we started off naively thinking that just exposing the team to new technology was enough – that once they saw it, they'd get excited to use it. Since then, we've worked with hundreds of groups and learned a lot about how to effectively introduce new online tools.