With the latest release of Loomio you can define your own templates and workflows, then make them available for others in your organization to use.

If you’ve seen our last article with Loomio’s new features, that was just the beginning! Here’s our latest batch of improvements and new tools.

Everything is new! It’s an exciting time for us at Loomio and also for our customers; we’ve listened to your feedback and here's the result — Loomio 2.0.

Score polling is a simple but expressive voting process which captures the level of preference voters have for each option in the poll.

> 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" %}

Hi folks, it’s Rich here, one of the Loomio co-founders. You haven’t heard from me for a while so I want to give you an update on what’s been happening this year. There’s been some incredible progress on the software, and I have a few stories to share after 9 months on the road too. 

Rich and Nati from Loomio are coming from New Zealand to join US-based team member MJ for a workshop tour across the States. We’re keen to meet with organisers who are interested in working non-hierarchically: whether they’re in cooperatives, startups, communities, collectives, NGOs or corporations.

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.

Join us for the New Zealand Premiere of an inspiring new film featuring Loomio alongside other cooperative organisations.

It’s been quite a month… Here in New Zealand we've been shaken by a 7.5 earthquake, while the world has been shaken politically.

Platform cooperativism is the radical idea that the internet would do more good if its major properties were democratically owned and governed.

# We got a shout out at the White House! Loomio has been picked as part of a suite of tools promoted by Together We Work, a campaign to empower young workers to take collective action.

We open source not only our software code, but our organisation too. Our impact mission is about democratic engagement, inclusive participation, and equitable collaboration, so that's how we work as a company internally.

The latest news from Loomio… Join us at conferences in New Zealand and Indonesia, celebrating our upgraded navigation in the app, and a range of useful how-to's.

We’re super excited about contributing to the upcoming OS//OS open source, open society conference.

There have been some exciting new UX developments at Loomio HQ! We’ve listened to our user feedback, and added a Loomio sidebar to make the most important parts of the app easier to find. You’ll notice some changes to the user interface:

## Our New Website is Live! We brought together everything we’ve learned about communicating the value of Loomio in a simple compelling way, and combined it with visually engaging illustrations. We’ve highlighted amazing stories of people using Loomio around the world, and made help content and other resources way easier to find.

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.

We’ve reached the final step in the process of switching everyone over the the new and improved Loomio interface.

It’s been devastating to watch as the conflict in Syria has escalated into the biggest humanitarian crisis of our generation. For those of us far away from the area, it’s frustrating not knowing how we can help. So when Rich from Loomio stumbled across an U.S. American activist working with Syrian refugees in Turkey, he reached out.

2016 is shaping up to be an exciting year for Loomio. Here are some highlights from the first few months.

We’ve been having a Mad Science kind of summer. One of our most exciting experiments has just bubbled out of the lab and into the wild. Announcing… EMOJIS!

For the last few months, we’ve been progressively bringing more and more people over from Loomio Beta onto the new Loomio user interface. As of tomorrow, all new user accounts will start on the new interface.

Spring has sprung 🙂 Hi friends! Spring has arrived here in Aotearoa and it is gorgeous! We’ve got a lot of juicy stories to share this month:

Here's a quick update with all the latest news from Loomio land for August 🙂

We recently returned from one of our biannual strategy weekends.

Rich has been doing a lot of design work for Loomio lately.

More than 86,000 people have joined Loomio, making more than 28,000 decisions in nearly 100 countries, so it's feeling like we're really starting to have some impact in the world!

I had the immense honour of being invited to participate in the g0v Summit in Taipei last year. The Summit was basically a chance for 700 people to get together and discuss the future of democracy, and hack on some projects that might help us get there faster.

Loomio is co-hosting the Open Source // Open Society conference, April 16-17 in Wellington, New Zealand, alongside GitHub, Chalkle, and Enspiral. Get your ticket and join us at the event!

Loomio has received a small grant from Catalyst to help Litemap and Assembl develop their collective intelligence tools. These tools enable users to map the structure of a discussion and visualise the connections between people, thought and action.

The Ministry of Economic Affairs, R.O.C. (MoEA) announced that the National Energy Conference is to be held Jan 26, 27. To follow the trends of collecting voices on the internet in nowadays, MoEA plans pre-conference discussions on the internet between Jan 14 – 20.

Well folks it has been an incredible few months and today is a very special day: we’re inviting everyone (starting with those who supported our crowdfunding campaign) to come in and check out a ‘pre-release’ version of Loomio 1.0.

We went out to the Loomio Community asking for feedback on the new designs for mobile/phone and desktop/tablet. In addition to some excellent suggestions for improvements on the designs, you told us you loved them! We can’t wait to release the new user interface at the end of November.

Another month has flown by, with some more huge progress in Loomio land:

It’s the first day of Spring in Aotearoa New Zealand, and it certainly feels like it. We’re now halfway between the end of the crowdfunding campaign and the pre-release date for Loomio 1.0. It’s been hard work, but immensely rewarding. We’re really motivated by all your support. All up, we’re cranking along and things are on track for November!

We’ve released some exciting new ways to see what’s most important to you on Loomio!

The Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) in New York is an annual gathering of people from around the world working towards a free and open internet. In June this year, we were lucky enough to be invited to present Loomio at PDF, in a session on “The Future of the Public Internet”. Ben Knight talks about his experience speaking at this amazing event.

Greetings friends, wow another month has flown past so it is time for another update from Loomio HQ.

## Released in the last few weeks ### Import Contacts

It’s Matariki here in Aotearoa New Zealand and we’re really feeling the winter solstice vibe at Loomio HQ – feels like it’s getting brighter every day!

You spoke, we listened – “editing comments” has been the most upvoted card since we opened up the public Roadmap.

Right from the start, Loomio has been a community-driven project. From day one, we’ve had real people using Loomio to make real decisions, and real world feedback from users has directed development all along.

Yesterday we released a whole new system for managing the privacy of your groups. Now when you start a new Loomio group, you’ll get the following options:

## Word of the Year: Gratitude It’s still a bit unreal – over 1600 people contributed over $125,000 to make the Loomio crowdfunding campaign a massive success. Because the “give now” button remains live, amazingly even now donations keep coming in. It was a huge validation of what we’ve believed all along: the world wants Loomio!

After an incredible couple of days, the target is within reach! It’s truly overwhelming to see so many generous people getting behind this project, reminding us that we’re not crazy to pour our lives into it for the last 18 months 🙂

After an amazing week, the $100K target is now well within reach! We’re blown away by our team of more than 850 people supporting us to make this project happen!

Sunday was the official mid-point of our crowdfunding campaign. Amazingly enough, on that exact day we made it to a major milestone, 50% of our $100k target!

It's been an amazing two weeks, with support coming from all corners of the globe. Thanks to the generosity of more than 600 wonderful people, we're nearly halfway to our goal with 3 weeks to go. It feels like we've got a real shot at making this happen, but we're going to need some help to get there.

The process of making a decision that Loomio enables is actually really simple: bring people together to talk things through, share ideas, address any concerns, and determine a clear course of action that works for everyone.

The best thing about building Loomio is hearing how groups are using it in their communities. It was humbling to learn about a cooperative effort between direct democracy groups in Greece, planning an ambitious experiment in citizen democracy across the country, using Loomio as their main platform.

Ami Dar, founder of Idealist.org, lends his support to Loomio during the livestream announcement of Idealist's new platform for changemakers. Loomio and Idealist's new platform share the same goal: using technology to turn ideas and connection into collective action to better our communities and societies.

> Improving our decision making skills is one of way to improve the world that we live in. Much of the happiness, and a lot of the suffering in our world comes down to the quality of decisions that we make, and the decisions that other people make that affect us.

Our Crowdfunding campaign for Loomio 1.0 went live today! Help us build a truly inclusive platform that allows anyone, anywhere to participate in the decisions that affect their lives, by supporting our campaign here: love.loomio.org

Over the last couple of weeks the London School of Economics has experimented with  crowdsourcing a constitution for the UK using Loomio. Jack Bailey from LSE – Public Affairs has written about the experience so far. Thanks Jack!

Loomio is excited to apply as a participating organisation in Google Summer of Code, which pairs university students from around the world with mentors at open source projects.

Happy New Year everyone! Loomio has a chance to get our year off on an awesome footing. We are currently in the running for the MIX Prize Digital Freedom Challenge – a competition run by the Management Innovation Exchange (MIX) for organisations who are encouraging and providing for increased autonomy in the workplace.

Greetings Loomions! Our second year at the Loomio Cooperative has turned out to be an action-packed and exciting time of developing the product, expanding the team, and spreading the word about Loomio.

We’ve been invited to speak at the World Forum for Democracy in Strasbourg, which has been the catalyst for our trip to Europe.

Thoughts en route: I am considering what it is I want from a trip as extensive and full as this one. Madrid, London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Strasbourg, New York, Rhode Island, Washington, Boston and San Francisco.

We may only be there for 28 hours, but our  stay in Madrid  is already packed with action.

Next stop on our exploration of the globe: Europe and the United States! Ben Knight and Vivien Maidaborn, two of the co-founders and dream-weavers of the Loomio Cooperative, are setting off from the Land of the Long White Cloud, Aotearoa, and are on their way to the Northern Hemisphere!

Hey there, Jon here, from the Loomio product team. I've been working pretty hard on some new designs for Loomio, and thought it'd be nice to share with everyone.

Those of us working on Loomio all have big dreams for what we’d like the software to look like in future. We’re continuously inundated with helpful feedback, awesome ideas and suggestions for how Loomio could be improved.

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]):

We are excited to announce that after 15 months of hard work, we’re finally launching publicly! The team has put a huge amount of time, passion and effort into this moment. But more importantly, we have been supported by an incredible community of courageous early-adopting users – all kinds of inspiring groups doing amazing things all over the world.

We're currently in the process of figuring out what sort of legal structure the Loomio organisation should take, whether that be a not-for-profit company or a worker co-op, or something else.

Each group in the Enspiral umbrella is encouraged to write a ‘company update' every couple of months to keep the whole network up to speed with all the projects going on. This is our second update, it is an attempt to capture a few of the huge number of exciting occurrences in the last two months in LoomioLand:

“Emergence” is an ugly buzzword for a truly magnificent concept that is central to our vision for Loomio. Jeffrey Goldstein defines emergence as “the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems”. Emergent phenomena tend to arise when many individuals interact with their environment, without central control, in ways that are governed by simple rules. Emergence in Nature There are lots of striking examples of emergence in nature.

Our campaign on PledgeMe has reached its goal, and more! We can't thank our generous supporters enough for throwing their inspiring energy and hard-won cash behind this project.

I think productive, inclusive human organisations and productive, inclusive human discussions can be typified as being “organic”, and any systems we build to try to coordinate & organise these organisations and discussions can be thought of as “inorganic”. So when we have a meeting with lots of good free-flowing discussion, that's what I mean by ‘organic'. In order to share the value of that meeting though, it needs to be distilled into minutes or notes: I would say these are ‘inorganic'. This is the crux of the organic/inorganic problem: the notes or minutes are never going to catch all the details and the subtlety of the actual meeting: for it be of any value, it has to be relatively brief, digestible, shareable. Groups and sub-groups are another version of the problem: the organic reality is that most humans are involved to different degrees in different overlapping sub-groups. The problem is, in order to get anything done you need to impose some kind of inorganic structure, but there is no perfect way to compartmentalise people into defined roles & responsibilities.  The problem we are grappling with is how to make a system that simultaneously captures the subtlety of reality while effectively summarising these subtleties into digestible chunks.   The answer is… fractals! My intuition says that the ideal Loomio will have all kinds of fractal characteristics. By fractal I mean self-similar at different scales, zoomable to infinite depth, recognisably beautiful. 

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.