The Loomio Blog

The Newtown Ethical Lending Trust was established in March 2012 to assist people in Newtown, Wellington, New Zealand with interest free loans.

Viv is a driving force behind Loomio — and one of the most well connected members of our group. It's become a joke in the team that if we need to find more users, we should just send Viv for a walk down the street — she's sure to bump into at least five people she knows. But finding users is only small part of the amazing-ness that is Viv, she helps us map our course through social impact, casts magic spells before parties, and helps us keep diversity top of mind. Here is Viv, in her own words: Name: Vivien Maidaborn Title: Loomio Dreamer and Vision Maker (aka business strategy) ## Why and how did you get involved with Loomio? After a 30 year career in the not-for-profit sector, I realised that charity models weren’t delivering scalable change anywhere in the world. In fact, most of the baseline measures (economic + social inequality, environmental degradation, etc.) I had thought would improve in my working life were actually getting worse. So, it felt to me like real social change would have to combine the skills, tools and the leverage of business, with the values, emotional intelligence and compassion that can be found in community and citizenship movements.  This for me is what I mean by ‘social enterprise'. In 2011 I resigned from my charitable CEO job and went looking for the right opportunity in this social enterprise space. I was introduced to Loomio and the rest is history!

Enspiral is a collective made up of individuals and companies that use the tools of business to create scalable social change. It’s mission is to get more people working on stuff that matters. > “Powerful things take place when like minded people connect, we've seen this repeatedly, where conversations spark ideas, which become projects, that grow into world changing ventures. Enspiral is a virtual and physical network where this happens.” Because Enspiral is a collective, meaning no bosses, they’ve had to bootstrap their own collective decision-making system. They found that email was too convoluted for important decisions, and face-to-face meetings too time-consuming. This left just a few people feeling like they were always making the decisions. Enter Loomio. 18 months ago, Enspiral helped found Loomio, and has been using the tool ever since, to help run this complex boss-less organisation without compromising on effectiveness.

A few weeks ago, we laid out our code roadmap for the future of Loomio – and we’ve been hard at work travelling along it! We’re pretty excited about the places we have been, and those still to come. Here’s a whirlwind tour of our journey, so you can start getting just as excited as we are! In the past two weeks, our code team have rolled out two new features: * You can now make an attachment of an image or document, which appears as a thumbnail in your post. * You also have the first version of your very own inbox, which displays discussions you’ve not read, giving you a clear idea of what you need to catch up on. ## Why is this important? Attachment is important because everyone has been asking for it 🙂 We’ve tried to release it as quickly as possible, knowing that there’s room to keep improving as we go. For instance, we’ll be improving performance of this feature in the near future to make it faster.

In a world fraught with violence, Nonviolent Communication (NVC) aims to transform how people communicate with each other, and is underpinned by an assumption that human beings are compassionate by nature. NVC was developed in the 1960s by Marshall Rosenberg, who wanted to understand how people can stay compassionate in the face of extreme circumstances and violence. The NVC community is active in over 65 countries around the globe. One of the many international conferences and trainings for people wanting to learn and practice NVC takes place in India each year. When Emma Collins, a Compassionate Communication Trainer, approached Loomio to discuss how our platform could support their project, their aims and intentions resonated strongly with us.

A comic-book whizz, a web developer, a chiropractor, a film-maker, several curators and a grocery store co-op owner: What do these people have in common? Well, they are some of the busiest people on Loomio: and they belong to the Adobe Books and Arts Cooperative. Loomio loves this group of people who have come together as a co-op to protect a well-loved community space, Adobe Books, in San Francisco’s Mission district. As Brett Lockspeiser explains, > “Adobe Books has been in San Francisco for 25 years. For 24 of those years it was a sole proprietorship, mostly run by Andrew McKinley, who owned the shop. Unfortunately, the business of selling his books has become harder and harder…combine that with San Francisco which is currently gentrifying at an obscene rate. In 16th Street of the Mission the rents were doubling”.

Those of us working on Loomio all have big dreams for what we’d like the software to look like in future. We’re continuously inundated with helpful feedback, awesome ideas and suggestions for how Loomio could be improved.

Richard Telford heard about Loomio from a friend at a local food swap in Seymor, Australia. His friend happened to be Carl Scarse, who several weeks ago posted this on our Facebook page: Carl and Richard know each other through the Intentional Community, Commonground, where Richard lived for about five years. The community began in the 80s in response to a need for support, resources and networks for social change activists. Today, Commonground is a co-operatively living community of activists and people concerned with living lightly on the earth, sharing resources, and supporting social change groups. Rather cool.

Rich has been described as “an engineer turned artist turned activist” and is one of the original forces behind Loomio. He recently gave a talk on Internet and Identity at Victoria University, so with that juicy bit of content we thought he was the perfect and timely opener for our spotlight on our people. Name: Richard D. Bartlett Age: 28, which is like a granddad in internet time Title: Director of Autonomy (Richard assures us this is true and not just made up for the interview) Team: Richard jumps between the code and community team ## Why did you get involved with Loomio? I have a background in open source hardware (as Rich Decibels) and creative community organising (with Concerned Citizens Collective). I got swept up in the Occupy movement when it arrived in Wellington in 2011. I’ve always been pretty concerned about the so-called ‘wicked problems’ facing society: runaway climate change, resource depletion, ecosystem collapse, and the pervading sense of alienation throughout society… This Occupy experience totally transformed my view on all that – it was the first time I’ve ever really had any hope for the future. My participation in that movement lead me to believe that there’s no problem that can’t be solved by an engaged community of empathetic equals. Occupy totally changed my life, and my hope is that Loomio can make that transformative experience much more sustainable, and accessible to millions of other people.

Thanks to everyone for making our launch party totally magical! Here's a video of Rich and Vivien presenting some of the Loomio story, supported by an international cast of contributors: Loomio launch party - timeline presentation from Enspiral on Vimeo. Click through for some magnificent party photos from Mark Russell (mark@adventureartists.co.nz):

We are excited to announce that after 15 months of hard work, we’re finally launching publicly! The team has put a huge amount of time, passion and effort into this moment. But more importantly, we have been supported by an incredible community of courageous early-adopting users – all kinds of inspiring groups doing amazing things all over the world.

Our campaign on PledgeMe has reached its goal, and more! We can't thank our generous supporters enough for throwing their inspiring energy and hard-won cash behind this project.