Welcome! Please introduce yourself

This is Luke Flegg's alter-ego (with no admin privileges) I created this account so I could see what our Loomio space for XR looks like for people who aren't admins

I'm the real Luke Flegg, living in Brighton, where my journey into XR began as I took on an ever increasing number of roles until the inevitable nomination for national came.

I now mostly only do a bit of Citizens Assembly stuff in Brighton (very promising with forward thinking council🙃)

And in XR UK I work mainly in the Strategy Stewardship Team. We design and facilitate the process by which XR UK's overarching national strategy is written. Comment here if you want a link to XR UK's strategy (short or long version) it was approved and released just before the rebellion and we've been late and overstretched and sorry and we hope for this strategy to help bring us closer in alignment with working groups more on the same page, clearer about our common vision and our pathway there.

I climb, I make films tiny.cc/lukeswork and I run my own social enterprise startup.

Hihi

I'm part of the Migration Team working on migrating people off Basecamp onto the tools XR use internationally - the global Mattermost chat platform (replaces campfires and pings), and UK Discourse forums (replaces message board) and Nextcloud docs and files (replaces docs and files, schedule, to do and Google docs).

Welcome :)

I hope we can chat soon Nikki! I would like to know why Discourse was chosen over Loomio? I'm concerned Loomio has more value to offer than any other single tool and could potentially do the job of 2 of them (especially when the mobile app is released next month with push notifications!) but people don't like being on lots of separate platforms, I feel like Loomio could meet the widest range of needs, including the pretty urgent need for an effective feedback system + advice process for decision making.

+447851054199

Or get me on

t.me/lflegg

Is your plan to move this conversation from Basecamp to here? I'm still waiting for an answer to my last ping - I was beginning to assume that my case was so convincing that you had decided to agree with us, and forget Loomio 😉

But if you want to move the conversation here, I am happy to copy and paste it.

Hi Luke, I'm in the tech team, main role the Migration Team, moving people on to new tools. I'm hearing that you are keen on adding Loomio to our toolset, that you have been experimenting with it, and have a detailed proposal of how we could use it. I may be able to help with integrating it with our other new tools, but I need lots more information about your experiments, your plan, and how you see it being used - is it just a talking shop for everyone in XR, or is it going to be more structured and/or controlled? If you have a test system up and running, I would love to have a login, so I can make myself more familiar with how it works and what it provides.
Sunday
Luke Flegg
Luke Flegg 10:44pm
Hi Nikki!
I think you must've made it on there the same evening you wrote this?
tiny.cc/xrloomio
I've removed all barriers to access while we experiment (I think only about 10% of our conversation needs to be private from the world, what do you think? One of my priorities is just to make it easy to participate in, so I like that you can see all the activity [except private threads] before you've even signed up/logged in)

Anyway, shall we have a chat?
t.me/lflegg
Or
+447851054199 - you can call any time
But yes my dream is that Loomio can become the primary tool for our loooong overdue feedback system + advice process in decision making (are you familiar with AP? Teal inspired organisations, etc)

I think this could really help bring us together in a beautifully aligned and effective way, rather than continuing to operate in silos across XR UK
Monday
Nikki Locke
8:02am
My dream is also that all XR throughout the world use the same platforms. So far I am totally failing to understand what Loomio gives us that the platforms used internationally don't.
Discourse has forums (better, IMHO, than Loomio), messaging, Wiki posts, polls of various kinds, good security. Mattermost gives us chat about as well organised and flexible as chat can be. Nextcloud gives us file and document storage, a Google docs replacement, calendar and kanban project management boards. Jitsi gives us video conferencing.

What does Loomio give us that we haven't already got (but not started to use in earnest)?

I remember reading somewhere that Loomio allows you to extract concensus opinions from general chat, which would be clever, useful and unique. But I can't find where that is - you obviously know the tool well, can you explain its UDP?
Tuesday
Luke Flegg
Luke Flegg 2:04am
Hey Nikki.
These are things I love about Loomio, and some of them are unique:
• Proposals & customisable polls - Loomio is designed for group decision making. No-one of the tools you mentioned are for that. They're for task management and chat. (right?)
This is the main reason to switch to Loomio.
You can chat (nicely organised in relevant subgroup) and replies nearly nested inside threads. Similar to Slack. But then you can launch a proposal: it asks when to close the proposal, what the outcome was, etc - people voting on it (on a scale: much more useful than binary yes/no) give their reason behind their opinion and this is shared along with their vote. It means we can turn a huge conversation into a tangible outcome and see very clearly in 1 simple graphic (with accompanying reasons) who is for a proposal, against it, anywhere in between, and why.
It also keeps past decisions neatly in the 'polls' area of the group so busy people can instantly catch up, looking at what actual decisions have been made and why and who voted and what the outcome is, without having to wade through the entire chat.
• Forking threads: sometimes a thread can seqway off into a tangent, and potentially take us further and further from the original post, while flooding everyone. This is a really big problem in my experience. Loomio allows you to 'break off' a comment inside a thread (among with all its replies) and make a new thread out of it.

Finally you can create tags and add them to any threads (eg. They could be working groups, and you click that tag to show only that specific working group and hide all other threads)
Nikki Locke
7:36am
Sounds a bit like Discourse to me. It has multiple choice polls. I think the results can be shown as a graphic (I'll be to check). It has tags (and, by tagging something as "poll" you could see all your polls in one place). You can fork threads, and copy stuff from one category or topic to another.
I think Loomio has more different kinds of poll, though (although I haven't checked).
It would be interesting to start the same kinds of thread on our Discourse as you started on Loomio, moderated by someone who knows all about Discourse polls, and compare the ease of use.
On the other hand, a Loomio of installation might be a good way of getting the more controversial arguments off Discourse. I wonder if we can make a tool to copy threads off Discourse onto Loomio?

Hey Nikki, sorry for not getting back to you on Basecamp - I did see your message and was trying to do more investigation into Discourse, which I'd heard of, but they do a really terrible job of just actually showing you the platform in use. The SEO is also super bad so it's a battle to find anything relevant on Youtube and there's no video-based socials on their website (or any videos on there, period!) so I'm still keen to see it in actual use!
There's an app, but it's extremely unpopular and doesn't look like a real app? (just re-packaged mobile website, which also opens stuff externally in browser?)

I also couldn't see any mention of proposals / group decision making tools on the Discourse website. If easy, maybe you could show me it in action?

To clarify, the main reason for Loomio in my mind is it fulfills our primary need for better group decision making (whether consent, advice process / feedback or reflection) Loomio is designed from the ground up to elegantly facilitate iterative proposals, which get better by integrating peoples' concerns. The UI is super clear, cross platform, proposals have various designs for different types of decision / feedback, they have super clearly visualised results, they have deadlines, and outcomes. You give your reason for your vote, and you can read other peoples' reasonings and change your vote, before the deadline.

My understanding is that we need a real tool built specifically for better group decision making and feedback rather than just another Slack-clone. Which is what Discourse seems so far to be, to me, but as I say I still haven't seen it fully in action really yet, so do let me know what you think about the above + link me to anything that could help me see more how it works. Thanks Nikki!

I see nothing in Loomio that isn't in Discourse. But then I haven't read the Loomio manuals. I was hoping you would explain what Loomio has got, aside from discussion and polls (both of which Discourse has).

Can't understand why you would think Discourse is a slack clone. Slack is a transient, synchronous chat platform. Discourse is a permanent, asynchronous discussion platform.

But I don't want to get into a platform war. I was hoping you would have a plan for how we would adopt Loomio, including who has permission to use it, who has permission to read and or comment on each topic of discussion, how you would migrate exististing discussions off Basecamp onto Loomio, how Loomio would be used for internal discussion by working groups, etc.

If Loomio does have something unique and useful to offer, we can create a Loomio instance on our server. But we need to have a plan on how to organise who gets to use it, and what for.

Right now I'm the only member of the migration team, so I can't take on planning, documenting and implementing a new platform by myself. Without major input from you, it's simply not going to happen.

So please come up with a clearly documented plan, instructions for users on what it is for and how to use it. Perhaps you could do that on this very Loomio!

Hey Nikki,
Yes, I have the feeling we' both know 'our own' platform better and the other isn't fully getting it!
Again if you do have something that can help me see Discourse in action that'd be great. They certainly don't talk about it being for group decision making, where as Loomio is literally designed first and foremost for that (written by a radical worker-owned co-op, out of the shortcomings of group decision making at scale in the Occupy movement)

There is already an XR self-hosted Loomio instance, used internationally:

decide.organise.earth

a few of us are exploring pros/cons/theoretical approach to migrating this to there (rather than being in a UK silo as usual!)

If experiments here continue to be positive and serve rebels well, then we'll make a more formal proposal to officially adopt it and do the documentation you're requesting. How does that sound?

Sounds like a good plan to me.
What working groups are you in? Could be one of them will be on Discourse soon.

Hi, I'm an ex-labourer with a passion for sustainability/regeneration. I'm an advocate of Permaculture, Transition Towns, Simpol Solution, Spiral Dynamics... that'll do to be going-on with. (: