Loomio – Crowdfunding a better way to make decisions together
loomio.org
loomio.org
Send us 100k, and we'll finish our beta application, and give you rewards, like your name in the code, or for $500, you can have a coffee with us on video chat. Or for $25,000, fly yourself here, and we'll give you a tour of the city and cook you dinner. Does this not sound crazy to anyone else?
If they raise an extra $150k, they'll develop extras, such as a plug-in architecture to enable an ecosystem of open-source plug-ins for different discussion and decision-making protocols that will scale to much larger groups. I don't know what the hell that even means, but isn't it a little irresponsible to even consider such features when you haven't made an official release, and proven the concept has any long term traction?
If you can't tell, this entire thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth. After 18 months of beta they're unable to launch, or make enough sales to organizations to fund their development, so they're asking the crowd for a 100k donation? I don't believe their software is as life changing as the video makes it out to be, and I don't think they have a viable business. I expect them to burn through the money, launch, and fade away.
for some context, Loomio is a bootstrapped startup that, though unlike many startups we're not selling equity nor selling advertising, because we believe these investments compromise neutrality. We're not doing this to get rich or to get someone else rich, we're doing this because we think it's something that can make a difference. And it already is
keep asking good questions
Set up a Loomio prototype group here: https://www.loomio.org/group_requests/new or grab the code from http://github.com/loomio/loomio
So if we're talking about the beta prototype, characterising us as "unable to launch" isn't fair. What the crowdfunding campaign is for is building Loomio 1.0, a redesign and expansion of the core idea we've validated.
The stretch goals would allow us to unlock matching funding from the New Zealand government, including taking on some big technical challenges. You are right that these are not yet well-defined, since we're still a ways off from starting to work on them. But there are serious challenges around scaling up meaningful online discussion and decision-making to large groups that I don't believe anyone has really solved yet. We want to take them on.
We've hung in there for 2 years already, and put together an amazing team. The incredible support of over 1000 people is now going to allow us to release Loomio 1.0 later this year. We're not going anywhere!!
So sorry it leaves a bad taste. If there's anything else you'd like to know that might help you understand it better, please let us know! We're a genuinely earnest and well-meaning group trying to build something we think can help people.
Nonetheless, congratulations on raising $100k from 1,000 users. That shows some dedication from the community, so you must be doing something right. Hopefully I'm wrong on my forecast, and good luck on the project.
For those of you who don't know, consensus decision making is not just a willy-nilly free for all. Over the years it has been refined by groups, it has developed strong points of process that help ensure it actually is a decision making process, not just a discussion that goes in circles or goes nowhere. (including the infamous hand signals that many saw during Occupy). If you are interested in consensus decision making, I highly recommend checking out this classic book.
http://consensus.net/pdf/consensus.pdf
While I don't think formal consensus decision making is the best tool for non-hierarchical decision making i all circumstances, I do think it is quite powerful /when used correctly/. Historically this has required strong facilitation skills and other roles (timekeeper, temperature checker, etc) -- all of which play their part in keeping the process working as designed.
Loomio has created a platform for decentralized non-hierarchical decision making that bakes in some crucial features /to accomplish formal consensus decision making/. All the activists I know that have tried it have been impressed by the dev team's responsiveness and dogfooding (Loomio uses Loomio), and have found the features enable formal consensus decision making in a way that a discussion board or voting polls or similar tools that aren't quite designed for consensus just don't.
I just have one concern, does only the leader present proposals? or can everyone do it? To me, letting only the leader (OP) do that makes sense. otherwise wouldn't everyone be just doing that instead of posting suggestions?
> Loomio is a user-friendly tool for collaborative decision-making:
Piqued my interest.
> not majority-rules polling, but actually coming up with solutions that work for everyone.
Skeptical because it promises to get rid of office politics. I want to know specifics how and why it works. Cold, hard, game-theory and/or economics. Maybe there is something useful behind that marketing-speak.
> We’re a small team in New Zealand, and we’ve built a prototype that people are already doing great things with.
Total non-sequitur. I don't care who you are. Convince me why the product works before I invest more effort.
> Now we’re crowdfunding so we can build the real thing: a new tool for truly inclusive decision-making.
Ah, it doesn't work yet.
> Youtube video
Sorry, I'm not going to spend an hour of my time when you've already proved yourself a bad steward of the last five minutes.
Contrast this to xerophtye's comment: short, punchy explanation how Loomio works.
Checkout the explore page for a few examples of groups using the tool:
I've also used it personally for a few things and I think the idea has really good potential. It ties open decision making into a discussion quite well. Try it out.
* http://davidjarvis.ca/world-politics/
* https://bitbucket.org/djarvis/world-politics/
See also:
in my experience, without a focus on dialogue this isn't easy.
The advantage of having only facts is that the interface is simpler. The disadvantage is that not all views might be represented, thus impeding dialogue.
I've already supported the crowdfunding and planning on contributing to the open source community as well. There is huge potential in Loomio!
However, 'Reclaim the Streets' never asked anyone for any donations. That made them very different to your typical 'save the world' group where the main point of the org/charity is just that, soliciting donations.
Like many people here I don't quite get what the money is needed for, even though it is spelled out. I also had a look at the github and it looks like things are aeons away from the 'Wordpress 5 minute install'. The Wordpress 5 minute install really is too much technical wizardry for a lot of folk, they need an 'I.T. Expert' (TM) to do it for them. Wordpress offer hosted versions to get around this trifle and I am sure that is the way to go, however, if you are open sourcing the code and expecting people to host their own, being open source is not enough, it has to be reasonably easy to install.
Every man, dog and cat rolls a few Rails apps before their breakfast in The Valley, so it is no big deal. Yet for the people that are just about okay uploading something like Wordpress to their 'FTP server' and setting up a database through some hideous 'cPanel' contraption do matter. These are the people likely to be administrators of a group somewhere that could benefit from your software.
A big focus for the next phase is making installing your own instance a lot easier. We're going to release a docker file for Loomio 1.0. But just in case you weren't clear, there is also a cloud-hosted version that anyone can use without technical expertise.
FYI - the website takes a very long time to load in Australia, I would suggest using a CDN to improve international load times.
We've tried to optimise load times but we will try to improve them further.
But, unlike most forums, we've tailored every feature toward bringing discussions to consensus. And when you're trying to decide something online, that makes a big difference.