The Loomio Blog

Running an HOA board is genuinely hard work — unpaid, often thankless, and loaded with legal responsibility. You're managing shared assets, navigating neighbor disputes, and making decisions that affect property values and people's homes. Most "HOA software" on the market is built for professional property managers: accounting modules, maintenance ticketing, resident portals. If you're a self-managed volunteer board, these platforms are overkill, confusing, and expensive. This guide covers what HOA boards actually need from governance software — and what most tools get wrong.

If you start a proposal without starting a discussion first, and someone votes — thoughtfully sharing their reasoning along with their vote — you can now reply to them, and they can reply back to you.

Jared Messinger manages a matrix team of 150 people scattered across three continents. It would give any leader nightmares. Each day, he confronts something most would find incredibly daunting: a complex team whose mission is to restore millions of hectares of degraded land to deliver durable benefits for nature, climate, water, and people over time. The World Resources Institute Restoration Program has grown dramatically over the past decade. From 20 people mostly based in D.C, it grew to encompass staff across offices in Kenya, Rwanda, Ghana, Brazil, Colombia, India, Indonesia, and beyond. As they scaled, Jared noticed, their decision-making infrastructure couldn't keep pace.

High in the Bulgarian mountains sits a massive communist-era building. Surrounded by pine forest, this 17,000 square meter, 200-unit locale has undergone a huge transformation. In its new life, this site is the home of Semkovo Co-op, a coliving destination for digital nomads and remote workers, governed entirely by the people who own the cooperative. Matthias Zeitler, founder and elected chairman of the Semkovo cooperative, had a strong intuition that traditional governance wouldn't work. "Most of our owners are distributed all across the world. We are from 32 different countries, and very few people are in Bulgaria consistently," he explains. "From the beginning, we wanted to find a model for all remote members to have full agency in all of our decisions."

For more than 60 years, the Ian Martin Group (now Raise) has been helping organizations hire better through traditional contract and permanent placement recruitment services, along with innovative offerings like Fitzii for smaller businesses and Matchfield for matching consulting engineers with top employers. "We describe our purpose as connecting people in meaningful work," says Luz Iglesias, Director of IT Recruiting. And that starts inside their own organization, by creating pathways for 450 team members to end every day with a sense of achievement.

Every time you see the padlock icon in your browser bar, that's likely the OpenSSL Library working behind the scenes. This open source cryptography library powers the secure connections that protect your passwords, credit card numbers, and private messages as they travel across the internet. So when this high-stakes technology organisation needs to make decisions, clarity and transparency aren't optional. "Open, transparent, community-centric," are the first words we hear from Anton Arapov, Operations Director at the OpenSSL Corporation. When Arapov joined the organisation three years ago, it was experiencing competing priorities. While much of the org was focused on championing open source community values, some groups were focused on delivering support for commercial entities like Microsoft, Amazon, and Cisco. This difference created an imbalance of focus.

When Zohran Mamdani made history winning New York City's Democratic mayoral primary in late 2025, the infrastructure behind his grassroots campaign looked nothing like traditional politics. The Democratic Socialists of America - New York City chapter (NYC DSA), a political party focused on city affordability and workers' rights, played a significant role in the campaigns, endorsing him for his Assembly seat and mayoral run. They also provided essential early support like volunteers for canvassing and fundraising. What you may not know is that the NYC-DSA had a vital tool working as a decision-making platform for the coordination of 13,000 members. These members used Loomio to make rapid campaign decisions while maintaining genuine democratic participation across the boroughs.

The Argot Collective exists at the intersection of technical excellence and organizational experimentation. Their groundbreaking work focuses on building programming languages and verification tools for the Ethereum ecosystem. They create the virtual infrastructure for people to build applications on the blockchain. The story of how this group makes decisions together is just as interesting as what they're building. When a group of researchers and developers decided to spin out from the Ethereum Foundation, they weren't just starting another tech company. They were attempting something a bit different: a team with no leadership hierarchy, where every consequential decision would be made through a consent-based process rather than a top-down command.

Thread → Discussion, Decision → Poll

It's a pleasure to be able to share these interviews with organizations that are thriving with innovative democratic practices using Loomio.

Reflections on an experimental reparations based program that accumulated funds through member contributions and redistributed funds using a cooperative decision making process.

The folks at Witchcliffe Eco Village in Western Australia's wine country are showing what's possible when residents reimagine not just sustainable living, but how they make decisions together.

What if "no bosses" was more than just a cool recruiting slogan? What if every person in your company had equal say in determining salaries? Not just their own – everyone's. Sounds like a recipe for chaos, right?

Camplight is a dynamic software development and consulting firm based in Europe. In the early 2020s it faced a challenge many successful organizations encounter: How do we make good decisions as the team expands? With 20–40 team members and a commitment to autonomy and flat organizational principles, they needed a tool that could support their collaborative approach.

Hello friends! I want to tell you about the new features we've added to Loomio recently. These have been developed in collaboration with our most active organizations, so I hope you'll find them relevant and beneficial!

Coordinating the governance of an organization that spans continents and time zones is no small feat. The ICCA Consortium, a prominent international association supporting the global movement for Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ collective territories of life, used Loomio in their General Assembly (GA), for the second year running.

How do distributed decision making practices scale to 450 staff in 3 countries and multiple time zones? Luz Iglesias, Tamara Extian-Babiuk and Sagar Chatterjee at Raise and Loomio's Michael Elwood-Smith met for a campfire chat as part of the Greaterthan Solstice Jamboree.

We’re delighted to introduce a big update to proposal templates in Loomio. Loomio now includes a series of predefined proposal templates for common decision processes such as Advice process, Consent process and Consensus.

At the 2023 Sociocracy Conference, we were invited to introduce Loomio and demonstrate how it is used by organizations practicing Sociocracy for collective decision-making. Check out the video to learn more about Loomio and how to use it for collaborative governance.

Igalia is a worker-owned, employee-run cooperative consultancy focused on open source software and services. We recently sat down with co-founder Xavier Castaño to discuss their journey, their organizational model and their collective strategy setting processes.

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.

Does your organization run on Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Mattermost or Matrix? Loomio has a chatbot for you!

LEDA is a cooperative of experienced architects and engineers who design outstanding sustainable buildings that are beautiful, comfortable to be in, and gentle on the planet.

Urban Space 500 is a Ukranian restaurant that gives 80% of its profits to community projects. They organize their 500 founders and gather their input with Loomio.

Loomio enabled the Green Party of West Australia’s wide-reaching membership to congregate, collaborate, and agree on policies quickly and efficiently together.

The Refugee Buddy Project Hastings, Rother & Weladen (TRBP) is celebrating universal humanity by welcoming and supporting newly arriving refugees to their UK town and using Loomio to organize their rapidly growing group.

Partago is a Belgium-based car-sharing citizen cooperative enterprise that offers only 100% electric cars. Their mission is to free up space in neighborhoods, reduce carbon emissions and toxic traffic fumes, and fight against climate change. Here’s how they are using Loomio to bring their mission to reality.

As humans embark deeper into the digital age, it is increasingly vital for companies to embrace communication tools, apps, and platforms. Behind almost every successful venture there is a team of software experts.

Keeping everyone up-to-date on the decisions happening in your organization can be tough and especially when you are working remotely. The good news? We have just released a big upgrade to make this easier.

We are fortunate to support many incredible organizations – each with their own particular management styles – and it’s not uncommon for us to adopt practices from groups in the Loomio community. When we learn from the examples of others, we are opening up ourselves (and our organizations) to growth. So, today we’re highlighting the Ian Martin Group’s journey to self-organization, a way of organizing that makes your company more resilient in the long term.