Happy Festivus! End of year update from Loomio
• Written by Alina Siegfried
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 hope you’ve been loving using Loomio as much as we have loved developing it. With the help of our international community, the tool has now been translated into 13 languages, with many more in the pipeline. Thank you to all who have helped on this project!
Loomio world tour
Okay so maybe not the whole world… but Vivien and Ben have just returned from a five-week whirlwind trip across the UK, western Europe and both coasts of the USA. The trip was sparked by the Council of Europe inviting Loomio to present at the World Forum for Democracy in Strasbourg. We decided to make the most of the sponsored travel and sent them on a five week trip to meet with Loomio users, supporters and groups working within the social enterprise, open source and citizen democracy communities in Europe and North America. They met with a huge number of inspiring people who are working towards a more engaged and connected world.
One highlight was meeting with Anne-Marie Slaughter at the New America Foundation, who have some amazing work underway with the Open Technology Institute to build tools to help communities maintain safe communications technology in unstable political situations. We’re at the beginning of an exciting conversation about Loomio providing a framework for community decision-making that could potentially be part of an open-source toolkit for resilient communities.
Other high points included presenting Loomio at the MIT Center for Civic Media, and connecting with researchers and practitioners at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, as well as making great connections with the Wikimedia Foundation (the organisation behind Wikipedia), and Strike Debt, the group coordinating the hugely inspirational Rolling Jubilee initiative. It was also an amazing opportunity to connect with leading thinkers whose books, films, articles and talks have been inspiring Loomio from the beginning, like Eben Moglen, Marshall Ganz, Catherine Bracy, Carne Ross, Micah Sifry and Douglas Rushkoff among others.
Product updates
Last month we announced the exciting new designs for the future of the software with a major focus on mobile support. Since then we’ve been hard at work developing all these new features. Over the next couple of months you’ll see some highly anticipated improvements emerging from the code workshop, including a brand new interface that works on mobile, a public-facing profile page for your groups, and architectural and privacy improvements that will make it easier to join groups, and quicker to get decisions underway.
Rent the Team update
Thanks to everyone who responded to our “For Rent” blog post. We were delighted to be overwhelmed with interest, with even more offers of work than we could handle! Our dev team is underway with contracts over the next couple of months so we’re in great shape as we get ready for the exciting next phase. Read on…
Crowdfunding
Early next year we will be embarking on our international launch and a massive crowdfunding campaign to fund the exciting next phase of feature development. As Loomio scales up and goes fully mobile, we’re rapidly moving towards our vision of a super accessible platform that enables anyone to participate in important decisions from anywhere. As we keep developing, we would love to have your input on what sort of rewards you would like to see in the campaign, and any suggestions you have to make a huge splash! Feel free to join in the conversation here.
Wishing you all a safe and happy festive season!
From the Loomio team
Would you like to keep in touch?
Join the Loomio newsletter to hear about product updates, upcoming events and stories from organizations using Loomio.
Delivered every 2 or 3 months.
