www.loomio.coop

Thanks @neilmorris for prompting me to finally register it and giving some background :)

Nice one Ben, and thanks go to @nellmorris for jogging his elbow. More on dotcoop domains can be found here: http://nz.coop/coop-domains/

Thanks @ramseymargolis!

@neilmorris , if you haven't met Ramsey, you should :) He's the Executive Director of the NZ Cooperatives Association, and has been a huge help to us from day one.

Ramsey, Neil is based in the UK, and linked into the co-ops movement there.

Cool.

I would love to see us using this site for all the innovation and learnings we're doing about running a tech startup co-op and our "cultural technology". The stuff that @strypey was excited about sharing with others who might want to tread this trail we're blazing.

It is a fantastic idea, go for it !!

We are www.civil.coop a cooperative of engineers functioning and of course inside loomio. We also have wikibank.coop waiting to provide it some use !

Great stuff @benjaminknightloom Thanks for the introduction to @ramseymargolis I've just seen him in person virtually as well. Did you notice the link to the NZ coops on the .coop article (i.e. second link above)?

Ramsey, I just have to ask how many of your members have begun to use Loomio?

As a Kiwi who has spent most of the last 20 years or so out of NZ, reading the list of members of Cooperative Business New Zealand was most interesting, in that there were a number of a cooperatives on it that I knew, but I hadn't realised (or had forgotten) they were cooperatives!

@alannakrause I would so like to see that information recorded somewhere accessible! There must be a lot of real important learning that we could all benefit from.

The end of Shaun Fensom's article highlighted something which Loomio could play an important role in: "facilitating the sixth principle of ‘co-operation between co-operatives’".

Thanks for the mention @alannakrause :) What I had in mind was inspired by Lawrence Lessig's "law is code" maxim. He sees CreativeCommons licenses as a set of "plug-ins" to Copyright Law. Each license has a Deeds which gives a lay explanation of what the license says, kind of like "comments" in source code.

The co-operative constitution you have created is the "source code" for an organisational "application", allowing it to run on the "operating system" that is NZ law. One thing I'd love to see is that legal code "commented" with lay English descriptions of the purpose of each section.

Following on from this, I'd like to be able to "fork" your constitution, like I can with the Loomio source code on GITHub, and create a new co-operative along the same or similar lines. Ideally, the same thing would be possible with other legal documents you create, like templates for worker agreements, contributor agreements, customer agreements etc. This process of demystifying the law around running co-ops would hopefully make it heaps easier for more co-ops to form.

@neilmorris I doubt whether more than a handful of New Zealand co-ops know about Loomio, let alone use it. I tried very hard to get the board of the society I work for to use it to discuss whether or not to approve membership applications but they weren't keen.
Cooperation among cooperatives is something I raise whenever I can, on an international as well the local level, and if I can count Loomio we now have five cross-border cooperatives operating here.
The important thing to notice about cooperatives in this country is that most have members which are small(er) businesses, rather than individuals and families, and this colours the movement.

I think loomio.coop should simply replace loomio.org and be used everywhere. That is kind of the point imho.

I've got quite an expensive .coop habit myself. For a long time we've had the awesome open.coop but we've also got uniteddiversity.coop ud.coop crowdfunding.coop and communityshares.coop! :P

I'll probably let the latter two go now that http://microgenius.org.uk is basically doing what I had intended they be used for.

@strypey what you describe below is exactly what is needed imho! :)