Please restore posting functionality on groups created before compulsory subscriptions

Hi David, thanks for raising your concerns about Loomio accessibility. We respect your concerns and thank you for holding us to account. This touches on a core value for us.

Please bear with us as we continue to work on this. We will reach out for support in testing and improving Loomio 2.0 for use by people with assistive technologies, and hope you'll be available when that time comes. In the meantime please know that we are very grateful for all of your support over the years and hope that we can deliver a user experience that serves everyone well.

Thanks @Strypey for the further points. I have engaged the cooperative in an advice process decision regarding old groups and will report back in a few days.

In the meantime we do want to maintain goodwill and invite anyone in need to contact us so we can figure out how to help each other.

We are generous in our response collaborating on specific groups, and can usually find a non-monetary exchange of value including; a use-case story we can publish and you can share with your network, language translation, beta testing and usability testing, published article or blog post, links back to boost SEO...

More soon 🙂

Thanks @Michael Elwood-Smith my faith in the Loomio Community has been restored :)

I'm sure that any group who are still actively using Loomio, but can't afford to pay, has either already made significant contributions of the type you mention, or would be more than willing to do so in exchange for continued gratis hosting. One option could be for group functionality to be restored, with the "your free plan has now expired" message replaced with something along the lines of "how would you like to contribute to Loomio in exchange for ongoing hosting", with a list of examples like the one you've offered here, and contact information? I would be willing to join a team of volunteers who individually follow up with such groups, and document their contributions, to take that weight off the Loomio staff.

Some communities may be in a position to self-host, especially those who already hosts other infrastructure for their own use. They could then offer gratis hosting to other groups with common interests and/or overlapping membership. An automated export system that allowed groups on Loomio.org to be moved to another Loomio instance would help a lot with that.

Is it possible to use the SSO system in Loomio in such a way that users with account on Loomio.org would still be able to participate in groups that move to another instance, without having to set up accounts for each one? If so, a blog piece explaining how to do that would also help tremendously.

Hi Strypey, Our internal advice process has closed and I have support from the cooperative to restore full use of old Loomio groups 🎉

We're just working through some details and I'll report back when complete - it may be a few days more.

Thanks for your suggestions and willingness to follow up with groups, they're really helpful.

We need to keep the work overhead with free groups to a minimum, so a passive call as you suggest, with a message inviting groups on gratis hosting to contribute, will probably work best. We'll look into this.

I don't think we will actively try to help gratis groups move off loomio.org, as the time cost will be greater than hosting cost, as you noted earlier - and simplest for everyone to stay on loomio.org.

Michael Elwood-Smith wrote:

I have support from the cooperative to restore full use of old Loomio groups 🎉

That's great news, thanks heaps for being so responsive to community
needs My faith in the Loomio kaupapa is now totally restored :)

I don't think we will actively try to help gratis groups move off loomio.org, as the time cost will be greater than hosting cost

Understood. AFAIK having an automated export tool for user data is a
necessity for GDPR compliance if you have any users in the EU. IMHO this
is a minimum standard for an ethical network service. It would make
sense for that data export to be in a format that can be easily imported
into another Loomio instance, since this would also facilitate groups to
move from self-hosting to a paid plan on Loomio.org, if they find that
self-hosting is more work/ cost than they anticipated ;)

FYI: We already support automatic data export and import

https://help.loomio.org/en/user_manual/groups/data_export/#export-group-data-as-json

Rob Guthrie wrote:

FYI: We already support automatic data export and import

Awesome! :)

https://help.loomio.org/en/user_manual/groups/data_export/#export-group-data-as-json

It would be great to build out the UI around this, so that group
coordinators can migrate their group from one instance to another
without needing server access. This would mainly benefit groups
migrating off Loomio.org, since groups migrating to a paid plan can
probably count on a bit of sysadmin hand-holding ;) I wonder if anyone
in the community would be willing to do some work on this?

As a side note, I see that page mentions JSON. The ActivityPub
federation standard is built around passing around chunks of JSON using
ActivityStreams vocabulary. Since Loomio already speaks JSON, it may not
be too much work to implement ActivitySteams and allow full federation
between Loomio instances. Mastodon also uses Ruby-on-Rails, so it may be
useful to borrow some components from them, or at least study their AP
implementation.

Outcome: We have restored non-paying groups started before 1 January 2018 to 'free'

Thanks again for raising this. We have now restored full posting functionality to non-paying Loomio group started before 1 January 2018 to a 'free' status.

Now, more than ever, we need to communicate and collaborate safely online, and I encourage our community to share how Loomio can help people continue good work.

For new unfunded community groups on Loomio we have introduced special rates at just $US 1 per person per year.

And we can always find a way to collaborate with any groups that cannot contribute financially, just contact us. 🙂