Loomio is Co-Hosting the Open Source // Open Society Conference

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!

We are extremely excited about this event because openness is a defining aspect of everything Loomio is about. Our mission is to enable a more open world, where transparency and accessibility in decision-making is the new normal. The work of being open is never finished, but openness has been one of our key values right from the start.

The question of the conference is What is Open?:

The recent move towards openness in the digital world was enabled by the Internet, as the most powerful communications infrastructure that has ever existed, which was built on free and open source software. This digital movement taps into the underlying human urge for openness that has always existed. OS/OS is a celebration of efforts to consciously reverse practises that deny people the right to share, to participate, to collaborate. We celebrate “the commons”, both physical and virtual, and work to improve commonly-held resources that benefit all.

Loomio's software is of course open source (fork us on GitHub!). We have also open sourced our internal company handbook, about how we organise democratically as a worker-owned cooperative. We practice open collaboration with our enthusiastic user community, seeking their input on everything from new feature development to our financial model. We are open about our story and our roadmap.

This event is a natural fit for us, and we think it's going to be an incredibly rich experience. We're very happy to be welcoming some of Loomio's supporters and champions to New Zealand for the conference, such as Sascha Meinrath – founder of

X-Lab & Open Technology Institute at New America Foundation, where Loomio co-founder Ben Knight is a fellow.

Loomio co-founder Alanna Krause will be the MC, welcoming a diverse range of participants to delve into their own questions about “Open”. She recently wrote on LinkedIn about why she thinks OS//OS will be amazing.

We're bringing an open, collaborative approach to how we're designing the conference itself – how could we not? We've launched an OS//OS Loomio community, where participants can get involved in shaping their experience. Attendees can also host an open space session, on their favorite topics related to openness….

There will be opportunities for technical experts and non-technical people alike to find their learning edge. We'll look at Open Business, Open Data, Open Government, Open Democracy, Open Education, and more. We're seeing a broad convergence across sectors, with people finding that open ways of doing things unlocks incredible human potential.

If you can be in Wellington April 16-17, get your ticket now, and join us in this journey to more deeply understanding the world of Open.

Tags: News Events Open source osos