Feature request - use Discourse for discussions

Thanks Robert - I think I understand your position on this, although I do also think there is an untapped audience of mainstream discussion forums users who could become Loomio decision tool users. To abandon these existing discussion platforms is a big deal. IMHO offering Loomio decision tools that can work with those mainstream forums is much more likely to provide value and grow usage.

Re the opportunity for others to try these kinds of integrations, is there an API where the Loomio decision making components can be used independently of the discussion capability?

We've spent a lot of time making decision polls operate stand alone. You can start a decision without a thread. Integration with other tools is the next step.

Are you wanting to work on this? Or do you have experience with a group using another platform and that want's Loomio's decision tools integrated?

Can you tell me how you came to believe what you're saying here?

Hi Robert, It is possible that my team could do some work on Loomio decision tool integration with other FLOSS platforms. The key platforms for us today are Rocket.chat (Slack-like real time chat) and WordPress. We're using these to help support some commercial comms and process automation solutions in a specific industry vertical. We are currently looking at integrating deeper, contextual and threaded discussions via Discourse.

Part of our requirement is to help a key subset of our users to make decisions together. Most forums and chat tools, including the ones we are using, already have simple polling capability. This is useful, but we need to support and manage more complex decision making processes. I find the work you're doing with Loomio interesting as you are building a sophisticated decision-support toolset.

So I guess my questions on Loomio integrations are selfish and opportunistic in that I'm looking to solve my own particular needs and use cases. However, I do think that decision making is holistically an extremely important and valuable process, and there is an important role for a great decision tool to play in the FLOSS ecosystem.

To my mind, decision support is a separate and distinct capability to the comms capability provided by chat and forum platforms, and so I think that there is a valuable role for a high quality, modular decision support tool that might provide tooling, frameworks, and communities of best practice for everything from simple polls to complex elections.

I also think that the decision piece is an emergent requirement, and of a higher order than the comms piece, so its much more likely that groups and organisations of all kinds (commercial and non-commercial) will choose their comms platforms before they even think about the decision tooling they might also benefit from. And once a group is using a comms tool it becomes a big deal for them to abandon it and adopt another solution.

To my mind, a good strategy for a specialist decision-support framework would be to build great integrations with leading comms platforms, rather than invest heavily in developing native comms capability.

It looks like this thinking does not align particularly well with Loomio team aspirations? If you're willing to share, I'm keen to understand a bit more about your platform strategy and maybe explore ways to collaborate on some integration pieces?

Hi Richard,

I think we're quite aligned in thinking, but have reached different conclusions. One of the things that is deeply embedded in Loomio thinking is that you cannot have clear group decision-making without the ability to discuss things with your group. So if Loomio were solely polling software, it would be an incomplete offering, and while Discourse is excellent software and somewhat values-aligned with us, it's not enough that we're happy with letting them take care of a core part of the experience we're trying to deliver. So we need, and have, a discussion platform, and we have invested a lot of energy in making it good enough to use.

From there, a good deal of the business side of Loomio relies on the value proposition of 'This is a place where you can make decisions with your group'. When we sit down with folks who are interested in paying a decent amount of money for Loomio, they often ask about integrations, but there's not really a clear pattern of what integrations they're after. We hear LDAP / SAML often. Facebook (both groups and messenger, which are altogether different beasts). Discourse. Slack. Rocket.chat. Sandstorm, back when Sandstorm was going. Basecamp, a time or two. And we'll build any of them, given that there's a client that reeally needs it. But thus far the people paying for hosted installs and enterprise plans are interested more in things like customization, like document management, like nested comments, and moderation tools and analytics.. things that let them better curate and understand their own community in our space. It's just closer to what they need, and we are happy to build those things because it delivers value to us and to them, and because it makes us a more attractive platform to more clients like them, which makes us financially sustainable as a business in a way we really haven't been since we were founded.

However, I think that we do share a vision for the potential of 'between the walls' decision-making. This version of Loomio has mobile apps with easy, step-by-step flows for creating polls and threads and stances (independent of a group). It's got deep linking to other apps and push notifications. It's got importers and exporters to/from Discourse and Facebook, so you can easily move your data somewhere else. You can forward an email chain to it and it'll make a discussion for you automatically. It emits events which are easily IFTTT-able to your favorite chat program, or to text messages. I personally am very interested in building in this direction (and have expended great effort to ensure that we can move rapidly in this direction when we're ready for it), but it's a high-risk, medium-reward kinda strategy at the moment.

We have made plenty of movements in this direction though; there is a fully-featured (although as-yet under-documented) API, we're an OAuth provider, there's a robust plugin system, we've set up hooks with services like Zapier in the past. I'd love for you to help. But if the question is 'will the Loomio team support replacing their own discussion platform with Discourse', it's just not something that we can spare any resources for.

I think next steps here might be to set up a call to explore a bit further how we might be able to work together, but unfortunately it being January in New Zealand, we may need a couple weeks before we can talk properly. A good place to start in the meantime is the API documentation, which I'm happy to answer questions about or accept PRs to :)

I'm working on a reply, I've found this through provoking and I think it's a nice opportunity to articulate my product thoughts. I'm going slowly though.

Thanks @gdpelican for all that. I'll look into the API and come back after I've digested that a bit. Looking forward to your considered thoughts also @robertguthrie .

I really like those ideas that James calls 'between walls' decision making. These approaches feel very promising for what I am hoping to achieve to support my own use cases.

That makes sense. I'd still love to see more integrations tho... even with just the login system... for example, if i could use my Loomio login to join other platforms / open source apps I think lots of developers of those apps would be up for enabling "Loomio Login" as Loomio is so well used and respected. Then we'd suddenly have taken a huge step forward towards (version 1 of) the Open App Ecosystem https://www.loomio.org/d/qpPj0gZn/do-we-have-the-same-idea-of-what-an-open-app-ecosystem-is ;)

Loomio is an OAuth provider, so you can use Loomio to log into other services, so this is possible today, you just have to bug said developers into providing a 'sign in with Loomio' function.

Basic steps:
- Create an app by going to https://loomio.org/apps/registered
- Give the app id / secret from that app to an OAuth client
- Follow the normal OAuth flow (we use doorkeeper) to obtain a code, then an access token to log in using your Loomio credentials.

I'm happy to live with "Loomio's vanilla commenting engine" - but with a couple of tweaks maybe, regarding nested sub-threads?

1 Make sub-threads collapsible, so structure of the main thread can be more clearly seen.

2 Make 'Reply' button on comments (currently a small grey back-arrow) larger, rectangular and ORANGE - mimicking the thread's 'POST' button - so that careless/hurried responders have a clearer choice whether to respond to the individual comment or the overall context. Since we have nested sub-threads, it would be good to make it easier for responders to systematically use them to go off at tangents and stay on-topic, instead of creating an endless string of tangents.

Please note, I'm not commenting on behaviour in this thread ;-), it's another (less web-dialogue savvy) group I'm referring to.

Thanks for the suggestions! Good idea re: orange reply button!