How do distributed decision making practices scale to 450 staff in 3 countries and multiple time zones? Luz Iglesias, Tamara Extian-Babiuk and Sagar Chatterjee at Raise and Loomio's Michael Elwood-Smith met for a campfire chat as part of the Greaterthan Solstice Jamboree.

We are fortunate to support many incredible organizations – each with their own particular management styles – and it’s not uncommon for us to adopt practices from groups in the Loomio community. When we learn from the examples of others, we are opening up ourselves (and our organizations) to growth. So, today we’re highlighting the Ian Martin Group’s journey to self-organization, a way of organizing that makes your company more resilient in the long term.

The Full Circle model works on two levels: a way understand and visualise diverse kinds of leadership, and a way to map the steps of innovation and execution of projects.

SolidFund is a grassroots commonwealth fund for worker co-op members. John Atherton talks about their aspirations and operations, and how using Loomio is helping them build the worker cooperative econoomy in the UK.

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.

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.

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.

By Ben Knight, co-founder, @Loomio @benjaminmknight _ Yesterday, 100,000 people mobilized in the streets of Budapest, in response to a proposed tax on Internet access. > “The Internet tax is a symbol of the government's authoritarianism – we not only need to defeat the Internet tax, we need to believe that we are capable of criticizing and influencing the state.' >_ – Zsolt Varadi, speaking out in a crowd of close to 100,000 protesters in central Budapest yesterday. Two years ago, large-scale protests in Hungary against education cuts turned very rapidly into a civic movement against an increasingly authoritarian government. In early 2012, Loomio was still in closed beta and we weren’t accepting new signups. All we had was a rough prototype, and our tiny team had no capacity to support new users. One Tuesday morning in February, a group request came in from a network of Hungarian student activists, who said they wanted to use Loomio because they were democratically organising in opposition to radical government education cuts.

The Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) in New York is an annual gathering of people from around the world working towards a free and open internet. In June this year, we were lucky enough to be invited to present Loomio at PDF, in a session on “The Future of the Public Internet”. Ben Knight talks about his experience speaking at this amazing event.

Driven to improve the lives of New Zealanders who experience mental illness, Jacqui founded and serves as joint chief executive of the Wise Group, one of the largest non-government providers of community-based mental health and wellness services in New Zealand. The organisation employs over one thousand staff and is regarded as one of the most sophisticated and innovative NGO service providers. Jacqui sat down with us to discuss the importance of staff engagement and why she decided to use Loomio.

Ami Dar, founder of Idealist.org, lends his support to Loomio during the livestream announcement of Idealist's new platform for changemakers. Loomio and Idealist's new platform share the same goal: using technology to turn ideas and connection into collective action to better our communities and societies.

Thanks to everyone for making our launch party totally magical! Here's a video of Rich and Vivien presenting some of the Loomio story, supported by an international cast of contributors: Loomio launch party - timeline presentation from Enspiral on Vimeo. Click through for some magnificent party photos from Mark Russell (mark@adventureartists.co.nz):