The Home Stretch: 30 days until we bring the first early access users onto 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.

We’re on track to deliver on all the commitments to our lovely crowdfunders!

• Mobile – Loomio 1.0 will work great on all your devices
• Safe – Docker will make it a lot simpler to host your own instance (check out some great new documentation about this on our Github wiki)
• Accessible – We’re working with accessibility experts, getting user testing feedback, making sure the software works with assistive technology, and more (supported by a grant from the Namaste Foundation, too!)
• Easy – The new Loomio 1.0 interface is intuitive, simple, and delightful (well, we think it is and hope you agree!)

We’re in the process of delivering the rewards people claimed as crowdfunding backers. If you’re due to receive one, you’ll be hearing from us soon. You can also look forward to a refreshed Loomio homepage, updated help page, and more, all coming together by the end of November.

To stay current with Loomio software development progress, you can always check out the roadmap, which is now IN SPACE!

What happens after crowdfunding?

In addition to delivering the commitments we made in the crowdfunding campaign, we’ve also been hard at work figuring out how to resource Loomio into the future. Our aspirations for Loomio are huge, so we want to find a scalable, sustainable business model that’s aligned with our values and social mission to make it happen.

We posed this question to the community, and the response has been incredible. If you haven’t already participated in this rich discussion, we’d love to welcome your perspective!

News

Thousands of people in Spain are using Loomio in the Podemos movement, and The New Yorker covered us recently in an article about technology and democracy.

Loomio, which is still in its beta version, has been used in seventy-four countries, in twenty-five languages. Podemos is employing it on the largest scale to date. [Loomio co-founder Ben] Knight is sanguine about Podemos’s prospects, and not just because a hundred and seventy-five Loomio users have been signing up each day in Spain; he also appreciates the party’s ethos. “So much of the public discourse in Spain is about collective intelligence. How do we get the government to unlock this collective intelligence?”

Team Loomio is all over the world in the next few weeks. Ben is speaking at FusionRiseUp in Washington DC and then ArtOfChange21 in Paris. Alanna recently returned from speaking at the Participatory Budgeting Conference in San Francisco, and is heading to New York to speak at Mix Mashup. Rich just got back from Australia and next week will be presenting at the g0v summit in Taiwan.

Back in New Zealand, Loomio has been nominated for the People’s Choice in the Open Source Awards. We’re also in the running for the Knight News Challenge for our entry, “Empowering libraries to hear all voices”. You can vote for us if you’d like to see this project become a reality!

New languages

Loomio has been released in Danish and Aragonés, with Turkish on the way. We’ve been working on support for right-to-left languages, and Hebrew and Arabic are both in progress. See all the available languages at loomio.org/translation

Inspiration

• On the Loomio blog: With thousands rising up in Hungary for a free internet, Ben recounts how Loomio went viral in Hungary, and even ended up on Hungarian TV!
• We got a very flattering mention on this BBC4 radio show this week: “Loomio is set to be the the Facebook of the citizen web”
• DemocracyOS is a partner of Loomio, and an amazing project to upgrade democracy. One of the founders, Pia Mancini, has given an incredible TED talk we think everyone should see.
• And don’t miss Loomio co-founder Vivien Maidaborn’s inspiring TEDx talk on radical management.

Alright, time for me to put my head back down and get this software out the door! Thanks so much for your ongoing support!

♥ Love from Rich and the whole team

Tags: News