This year Rich & Nati have been delivering collaboration workshops around Europe as The Hum, and in the downtime, Rich has been talking with people about the topics he cares about. I'm pleased to share some of that talking with you in the form of these interviews.

> The Full Circle model works on two levels: a way understand and visualise diverse kinds of leadership, and a way to map the steps of innovation and execution of projects. {% youtube "J9wnSdVlqcw" %}

Loomio Co-op Member and Director MJ Kaplan has been all over the US in recent months, at conferences exploring impact, collaboration, the economy, the future of work, and more.

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.

The last few years have been quite a journey for Loomio. This is a story about navigating the world of startup financing to find ethical investment that works for a truly mission-driven tech company with big ambitions.

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”.

Name: Mix Age: 29 Title: Scrum-Master Mix Team: Product Team ## Why did you get involved with Loomio? It started off as a coding internship in Enspiral. I was interested in honing my skills and Loomio was interested in volunteers. In retrospect, it’s probably no accident that Loomio resonated so well with me – I’d recently come from working in a progressive secondary school which values things like collaborative planning of individual education pathways, community engagement and communicating on equal footings.

Viv is a driving force behind Loomio — and one of the most well connected members of our group. It's become a joke in the team that if we need to find more users, we should just send Viv for a walk down the street — she's sure to bump into at least five people she knows. But finding users is only small part of the amazing-ness that is Viv, she helps us map our course through social impact, casts magic spells before parties, and helps us keep diversity top of mind. Here is Viv, in her own words: Name: Vivien Maidaborn Age: 53 Title: Loomio Dreamer and Vision Maker (aka business strategy) ## Why and how did you get involved with Loomio? After a 30 year career in the not-for-profit sector, I realised that charity models weren’t delivering scalable change anywhere in the world. In fact, most of the baseline measures (economic + social inequality, environmental degradation, etc.) I had thought would improve in my working life were actually getting worse. So, it felt to me like real social change would have to combine the skills, tools and the leverage of business, with the values, emotional intelligence and compassion that can be found in community and citizenship movements.  This for me is what I mean by ‘social enterprise'. In 2011 I resigned from my charitable CEO job and went looking for the right opportunity in this social enterprise space. I was introduced to Loomio and the rest is history!

Rich has been described as “an engineer turned artist turned activist” and is one of the original forces behind Loomio. He recently gave a talk on Internet and Identity at Victoria University, so with that juicy bit of content we thought he was the perfect and timely opener for our spotlight on our people. Name: Richard D. Bartlett Age: 28, which is like a granddad in internet time Title: Director of Autonomy (Richard assures us this is true and not just made up for the interview) Team: Richard jumps between the code and community team ## Why did you get involved with Loomio? I have a background in open source hardware (as Rich Decibels) and creative community organising (with Concerned Citizens Collective). I got swept up in the Occupy movement when it arrived in Wellington in 2011. I’ve always been pretty concerned about the so-called ‘wicked problems’ facing society: runaway climate change, resource depletion, ecosystem collapse, and the pervading sense of alienation throughout society… This Occupy experience totally transformed my view on all that – it was the first time I’ve ever really had any hope for the future. My participation in that movement lead me to believe that there’s no problem that can’t be solved by an engaged community of empathetic equals. Occupy totally changed my life, and my hope is that Loomio can make that transformative experience much more sustainable, and accessible to millions of other people.

Thanks to everyone for making our launch party totally magical! Here's a video of Rich and Vivien presenting some of the Loomio story, supported by an international cast of contributors: Loomio launch party - timeline presentation from Enspiral on Vimeo. Click through for some magnificent party photos from Mark Russell ([email protected]):

Hi! I'm Rich. I'm one of the people working on Loomio. I come to the project from an arts/activist background, so I have some pretty strong feelings on culture, community, and business. One of the inspiring things about the team we've got is that there is room for people with different ideas. There are people like me who have a knee-jerk reaction to business (eww yuck boo), but there are plenty of others with a more mature and experienced view that are really excited about the potential for the tool to help businesses work more efficiently and more democratically.  In preparation for last week's meeting about the Loomio business structure, Jon, Ben and I had an email conversation. Don't take it too seriously, it's just an off-the-cuff statement of my position regarding Loomio and the Tyranny of Money. It was intended to be read by an audience of two friends, but I figure it couldn't really hurt for anyone else that wants to get a better idea of how I feel about the project.