What the heck is this Loomio thing? Can it help us make better decisions as a community?

[Cam Findlay]

Hi all, 

I’m going to try an experiment. 

A few of us in the core developer group have been testing out an interesting open-source decision making tool called Loomio.
To find out a bit more about what Loomio is check out their website https://www.loomio.org/ 

We’ve set up a few discussions to trial it out, essentially it allows discussions to be backed up with voting on peoples positions and points of view. This process can be repeated until a consensus agreement reached among those participating in the discussion.
All nice and transparent and able to refer back to later if we every needed to know why we took a particular action as a community. We think it would be useful for architectural and implementation discussions and proposition of community direction and initiatives.

I’d really appreciate it if you popped over and had a go at commenting and voting on a few of the discussions in our SilverStripe space (which have been cherry picked from this google group). On a side note, we actually used Loomio to decide to pick topics from here so proving it's usefulness.

[SilverStripe Loomio space]
https://www.loomio.org/g/OmDxAXNu/silverstripe

We won’t be implementing this tomorrow, so don’t worry :) 

For now we are seeing whether the inclusion of this ability to capture, discuss and move towards better decision making end points might allow us to drive more meaningful action around SilverStripe open-source. I wanted to ensure everyone was included in the discussion and that we make a good decision on any moves made around community tools like Google Groups which we use a lot.

Ideally this may become a more useful replacement for our current google group discussions which I find often has excellent discussion but I find the decisions end up getting a bit lost. 

I also like that 1) It is open-source and 2) it is another open-source project from Wellington, New Zealand (just like SilverStripe!). 

Thanks, and look forward to a bit of discussion over on the test Loomio space. 

[Cam Findlay]

I just want to send a big thanks to everyone currently giving Loomio a go, seems overwhelmingly positive engagement with it so far, keep up the good conversations. I'll let this run for a couple of week and then will ask you for some reflections on how you have found using it so we can make a formalised decision to adopt and work out some ideas as to when it is best times to use it :)

Again, thank you :) 

[Cam Findlay]

Quick update on the Loomio experiment...

I'll follow up with a more fully thought out retrospective on what was learned from playing with the tool (and again thank you to those on the dev list that participated). 

At this point, while there was excellent engagement and a lot of positive feedback (both posted in Loomio and mentioned to me in person) on having a clear way to track peoples positions on discussions, there are a few deal breakers as it currently stands (mobile compatibility, email notifications, general stability). The good thing is that these items seem to be known to Loomio and they have these on their roadmap and are actively working on things.

My next actions are:

1. Let the last couple of Loomio proposals play out.
2. Write a retrospective outlining things that were good and not so good to post here on the dev list (to which you can give me your perspectives and experiences).
3. Move the valuable discussions/resolutions we reached on a few items back over into the dev list (there was some great discussion and real progress on a few items which I'd like us to continue on with).
4. Make a notice on Loomio explaining our experiment and that we are currently not considering adoption until certain features/stability is reached.
5. Lead a further discussion around what the explicit features are that we need and want for the future to help drive better decision.
6. Keep an eye on Loomio's progress and look to re-evaluate at some point in the future.

 Again, thanks for giving it a go, I appreciate the willingness to experiment and learn - it's what keeps us innovative and vibrant as a community.

[Zauberfisch]

As mentioned on loomio before, I was actually keen to adopt loomio, but after using it a bit I am starting to miss some crucial features like the per message email notifications and reply by email.

Like many, I still like the ideas behind loomio and the existing features are quiet good, but I agree that for now adopting loomio is not an option.
I am, as you suggested, happy to give it another try once some of the mentioned issues are fixed by loomio.

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[Nicolaas Thiemen Francken - Sunny Side Up]

+1 - i liked using it - although the experience was limited and I dont mind putting up with its limitation as I like to support what they do and ultimately - it is just a tool... It is about the people contributing what will make the difference. 

[Cam Findlay]

Hi all... last year we trailed a tool called Loomio - many liked it, it was useful for making decisions on things however it was lacking a number of features we needed like email subscriptions and mobile friendly.

I passed all that feedback on to the guys that make Loomio (it's another open source project out of New Zealand) and this week they finally got back to me to let us know that they have added all the features that we commented on... this from Derek (on of their open source core people):

"We've done heaps of work on Loomio since then and if I'm not mistaken we've built all the features you mentioned you were missing (email notifications / mobile responsive) and more! I was wondering if you might be interested in connecting sometime about giving Loomio another try? Let me know if you're keen and we can figure out some time that might work"

So just a quick email to see if people are happy here on Google groups? Or would we be interested in seeing if Loomio might be a useful tool for us now that it has most of the same features plus more. 

Let me know your thoughts.

[Ingo Schommer]

Hey Cam, I've never been a big fan of Google Groups, but also not a fan of fragmentation ;)

The new Angular interface for Loomio looks pretty sweet, and the introduction of notifications is a big step forward (see original Loomio thread). But we have uservoice for community idea collection, and Loomio still doesn't look like a general purpose discussion platform. Not every thread on our mailinglist will have a decision attached to it, right? Maybe that aspect should move back to ss.org/forums though. Are there other open source software projects which use Loomio to discuss their core development there?

One blocker for me is the lack of an API - I don't want content to be locked in to a specific solution (like it is at the moment with Google Drive). Apparently its on the roadmap though (see https://www.loomio.org/help).

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[Jonathon Menz]

I don't mind Google Groups but I'm really not a fan of UserVoice so far. It doesn't support markdown or any other rich formatting so it's hard to present much information clearly, voting isn't accountable and can be spoofed (you can vote anonymously), there's no downvote option, rss or newsletter subscription (visibility of ideas suffers).

Loomio looks heaps better, would be keen to give that a try. Otherwise could we just use github issues (so devs don't have to use yet another tool), tag them appropriately, and votes could be tallied with something like this: http://poll.gitrun.com/ ?