Loomio
Loomio is a Wellington-based worker cooperative that develops open-source collaborative decision-making software. Founded in 2012, it grew out of Enspiral — a New Zealand network of social-enterprise workers — and the Occupy movement's need for better collective decision-making tools. The cooperative ownership model is unusual in civic tech: the people building the platform are also its members.
The software supports threaded discussions, proposals, polls, ranked choices, and time-bound decisions. Groups move between async conversation and formal decision-making in the same space. It supports 30+ languages with automatic inline translation.
Loomio is widely used by cooperatives, local councils, NGOs, and community organisations across New Zealand, Australia, and internationally.
Key people
- Richard D. Bartlett and Ben Knight — co-founders (2012), growing out of the Enspiral network of social enterprises and the Occupy movement's need for better collective decision-making tools. Bartlett went on to write and speak widely on self-organising, sociocracy, and open-source governance.1
Links
- Website: loomio.com
- Source code: github.com/loomio/loomio
- Wikipedia: Loomio