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!
Accessibility
At the end of last year we announced the first “early access” to the new version of the software (Loomio 1.0) to crowdfunding backers. Since then a big focus of the work has been on accessibility: we're working with an international community of people with different disabilities to make sure Loomio 1.0 is going to be the most accessible discussion platform on the web.
Here's me talking about how we're making Loomio work for blind people
This has been a tremendous experience for me personally, especially learning how blind people navigate the web and how a small effort on the part of people building technology can make a huge difference to some people’s quality of life.
Heading for launch…
We're progressively bringing more and more people onto the new software, iteratively improving the usability of the platform with each new batch. We’re working towards a public launch date later this year, which will be a major push to announce ourselves to the world in a big way.
We want to be in a financially sustainable position before we invite millions of people to get on board. To that end, we've been developing relationships with impact foundations in the US who support social good projects like this. Nothing is signed yet, but I can say we're feeling optimistic about our prospects 🙂
Advisory Council
We’re also supremely honoured and excited to introduce our Advisory Council, some of the brightest minds in democracy and tech internationally:
One of the benefits of doing this work is that we get invited to talk to all kinds of different groups around the world.
Here’s Alanna talking introducing Loomio to the Mix Mashup in New York, a gathering of “management innovators—pioneering leaders, courageous hackers, and agenda-setting thinkers from every realm of endeavor.”
And while Alanna was in the States talking to the management innovation community, I was in Taiwan talking to some young radicals about the future of democracy. Here’s a blog post and video from my trip.
And finally here’s Ben at the Skoll World Forum, discussing the Future of Work on a panel with Bettina Warburg from the Institute for the Future and David Jones from Microsoft. It highlights a very interesting divergence between Loomio’s vision of the future where people can use open source technologies to co-create a more sustainable equitable world, and Microsoft’s vision of a future where proprietary software makes the status quo a little more convenient.
Thank you so much for supporting this vision! It’s an ambitious journey, but it’s great to know we’re travelling together with such an amazing community of supporters like you.
