1st issue is that one cannot individually reply to one person, like you can on facebook. Second is that people are confused between a discussion and decisions and are asking for decisions in discussions.

Thanks for creating this discussion. I think we must not assume that we use loomio for everything, but I do think that for somethings it will work better then email. Here are a few comments on the issues you raise.

1. I think the point of the platform is about collective decision making, so I don't miss the fact of replying to individuals. But if you do want to prompt someone in particular you can do this:

Prompt people with @mentions

If you want to get the attention of a specific person in your group, type ‘@’ followed by their name. They’ll get an email letting them know you’ve mentioned them in a comment.

1. As every tool, i think we will learn how to best use it in the process. Here is what Loomio suggests:

Different ways to use Loomio

You need the group to discuss a broad topic and develop a solution together

Strategy: Discuss a topic for a while before creating a proposal.

Discussions often reach the best outcome if you build shared understanding about the problem before jumping to a specific solution. When people get to participate in the process, they’re much more likely to be on board with the outcome.

You already have a proposal in mind, and you want to get sign-off from the group to move forward.

Strategy: Start a discussion about a specific decision and make a proposal immediately.

If you’ve got a clear outcome in mind but you want to make sure there aren’t any critical concerns, you can use the proposal to get quick input into a decision.

You can do things like finalise a document, approve an application, or sign-off on a piece of work.

You can find more "how to" here: https://www.loomio.org/help

@saeedabukhari1 I like the idea of subgroups that you are trying out. Maybe they could correspond to working groups, (press, outreach, etc) and then within them the discussion on topics relevant to that working group could develop.

I think that is what the tool designed it to be but functionally its just an enclosed area and lends itself for many things. Also one can make it fully transparent and even full membership to all

Also it can also help to overcome some of the limitations of the tool and provide extra structure and clarity.

E.G. Lets say we decide that some people want to discuss NHS Privatisation and are very focussed on this.

Then that could be structured into discussions in a subgroup.

So Subgroup NHS Privatision
Discussions in Sub Group
-- What is our high level Objective
-- What do we want to do next
-- How do we want to do it
-- When
-- Meetings and Deadlines

-- Meeting and deadlines could contain all upcoming meeting and deadline dates

etc -- Do you see how I am thinking? What do you think of that?

Sounds good.
I guess, we should allow groups to self-organise how they find best, but maybe we could suggest some guidelines/options as we go ahead.

Exactly, but remember we are only trialing this tool and have not made a decision to use it as a group. We made a decision to try it out for the media group and then feedback to the larger group including to trial other tools. So now is the time to experiment and as we say in IT, try hard to break it and see where it fails and what can be fixed.

P.S it seems to have got a bit out of hand in that lots of people are joining who are not in the media group