The Loomio Blog

It’s been devastating to watch as the conflict in Syria has escalated into the biggest humanitarian crisis of our generation. For those of us far away from the area, it’s frustrating not knowing how we can help. So when Rich from Loomio stumbled across an U.S. American activist working with Syrian refugees in Turkey, he reached out.

Alanna from Loomio met Vica Rogers in London, to learn more about her world of citizen education and activism. Vica was involved in the Occupy movement in the UK, and has continued working on related issues ever since. We took some time in Vica's back garden to hear about how group collaboration is helping citizens in her community organise around the issue of debt.

2016 is shaping up to be an exciting year for Loomio. Here are some highlights from the first few months.

Alanna from Loomio met Simon Sarazin in Berlin at “Capital for the Commons”, where Simon was presenting his work on uCoin, a project seeking to implement universal basic income through cryptocurrency. He took a break from hacking on economics to tell us how collaborative governance has transformed his co-working space in Lille, France.

Alanna from Loomio met Till Wolfer at POC21, a 6 week innovation camp in France focused on open source hardware for sustainability. Till was lending his expertise as an architect and designer. He stepped out for a moment to share how he collaborates back home with a 200-person artist collective occupying 12 buildings in Hamburg, Germany.

Alanna from Loomio met up with Michel Bauwens in Berlin, while both were participating in a conference about Capital for the Commons. They managed to slip out for a few minutes so Michel could tell Alanna about his experience using Loomio with the P2P Foundation, which he founded.

We’ve been having a Mad Science kind of summer. One of our most exciting experiments has just bubbled out of the lab and into the wild. Announcing… EMOJIS!

Loomio cofounder Richard D. Bartlett chats with Matthew Luxon, Auckland changemaker and Loomio champ Matthew Luxon is director of Envision NZ. They develop ideas for social benefit, especially those related to waste and resource recovery: e.g. establishing community recycling centres. “Last year I was working on a project in the Waikato region, with a wide range of stakeholders. As I’m driving from Auckland to Hamilton over and over again, I’m thinking: there must be a better way. Loomio would have halved those trips!”

Alanna from Loomio caught up with Jessy Kate Schingler and Brittany Ferrero in San Francisco, where they were gathering with other social entrepreneurs connected to Enspiral. They took some time out to talk about how collaboration works in their co-living hotel.

Alanna met Benjamin Tincq and Francesca Pick at POC21, an open source hardware innovation camp in a castle in France, which OuiShare was a core convener of. They stepped out to share how they collaborate as a large-scale international distributed community.

Alanna from Loomio met Romain Chanut at POC21, a 6 week innovation camp in France focused on open source hardware for sustainability. Romain was there with his “Do It Together” JerryCan – a low cost computer you can assemble from recycled materials. We took a break from hacking on hardware to learn more about his other role, as a digital transformer in a social media collective.

Alanna from Loomio met Manon Piazza at POC21, where we were occupying a disused castle outside Paris, prototyping a sustainable society and hacking on open source hardware.

For the last few months, we’ve been progressively bringing more and more people over from Loomio Beta onto the new Loomio user interface. As of tomorrow, all new user accounts will start on the new interface.

If you’ve read the introductory guide to making great decisions with Loomio, you’re ready to learn about some of the creative ways you can use proposals.

Spring has sprung 🙂 Hi friends! Spring has arrived here in Aotearoa and it is gorgeous! We’ve got a lot of juicy stories to share this month:

Here in the Loomio team, we have been using Loomio since it was only a pie graph with buttons, and we've learnt a few things along the way.

Here's a quick update with all the latest news from Loomio land for August 🙂

We recently returned from one of our biannual strategy weekends.

Rich has been doing a lot of design work for Loomio lately.

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!

The Equally Well Summit brought people from diverse backgrounds together to discuss a critical problem. Loomio enabled engaging participants prior to, during, and after the conference – helping turn talk into action.

I had the immense honour of being invited to participate in the g0v Summit in Taipei last year. The Summit was basically a chance for 700 people to get together and discuss the future of democracy, and hack on some projects that might help us get there faster.

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!

This is the first article in our Cultural Technology series, where we share practices for working in a networked organisation. This is very much a work in progress but we hope it’s valuable to share what we’re learning.

We’re building this organisation on the principle that anyone affected by a decision should be involved in making it.

Loomio has received a small grant from Catalyst to help Litemap and Assembl develop their collective intelligence tools. These tools enable users to map the structure of a discussion and visualise the connections between people, thought and action.

Ever failed at getting your team engaged with new technology? We have. Like many other people, we started off naively thinking that just exposing the team to new technology was enough – that once they saw it, they'd get excited to use it. Since then, we've worked with hundreds of groups and learned a lot about how to effectively introduce new online tools.