The Loomio Blog

I think productive, inclusive human organisations and productive, inclusive human discussions can be typified as being “organic”, and any systems we build to try to coordinate & organise these organisations and discussions can be thought of as “inorganic”. So when we have a meeting with lots of good free-flowing discussion, that's what I mean by ‘organic'. In order to share the value of that meeting though, it needs to be distilled into minutes or notes: I would say these are ‘inorganic'. This is the crux of the organic/inorganic problem: the notes or minutes are never going to catch all the details and the subtlety of the actual meeting: for it be of any value, it has to be relatively brief, digestible, shareable. Groups and sub-groups are another version of the problem: the organic reality is that most humans are involved to different degrees in different overlapping sub-groups. The problem is, in order to get anything done you need to impose some kind of inorganic structure, but there is no perfect way to compartmentalise people into defined roles & responsibilities.  The problem we are grappling with is how to make a system that simultaneously captures the subtlety of reality while effectively summarising these subtleties into digestible chunks.   The answer is… fractals! My intuition says that the ideal Loomio will have all kinds of fractal characteristics. By fractal I mean self-similar at different scales, zoomable to infinite depth, recognisably beautiful. 

Hi! I'm Rich. I'm one of the people working on Loomio. I come to the project from an arts/activist background, so I have some pretty strong feelings on culture, community, and business. One of the inspiring things about the team we've got is that there is room for people with different ideas. There are people like me who have a knee-jerk reaction to business (eww yuck boo), but there are plenty of others with a more mature and experienced view that are really excited about the potential for the tool to help businesses work more efficiently and more democratically.  In preparation for last week's meeting about the Loomio business structure, Jon, Ben and I had an email conversation. Don't take it too seriously, it's just an off-the-cuff statement of my position regarding Loomio and the Tyranny of Money. It was intended to be read by an audience of two friends, but I figure it couldn't really hurt for anyone else that wants to get a better idea of how I feel about the project.