Loomio
Fri 16 May 2014 3:30AM

Updates from Loomio HQ

AI Alanna Irving Public Seen by 475

Hello Loomio community! Now that the dust has settled after the big crowdfunding campaign, we're making a big effort here at Loomio HQ to clarify some internal structures and make sure we start doing a good job of keeping the wider community up to date about our progress. From now on, I will be posting updates here in this thread at least weekly.

We will also continue updating the Loomio blog and social media channels as well, and we'll also be sending occasional updates by email to the crowdfunding supporters (unless they opt not to receive them of course).

Please check back on this thread when you want to know the latest!

AI

Alanna Irving Fri 16 May 2014 3:40AM

Update 16 May, 2014

Since the Crowdfunding campaign came to an end, team Loomio has been going through a bit of an internal restructure to make absolutely sure we're on track to use the resources we've been entrusted with to deliver on the promises we made in the campaign. Over the next 6 months, we will be working hard to deliver Loomio 1.0!

22-24 May we're going away just outside of our home base in Wellington New Zealand to finish this planning process. We'll be reporting back on this like the product roadmap after that. We'll also be having an AGM report to the cooperative members and board of directors, and doing a big review of the crowdfunding campaign and consolidating everything we learned from the experience. Right now we're doing the prep work for that.

The development team right now is working on the "whitelabel" version of Loomio, which is the customisable version (with your own logo, etc) that was a reward in the crowdfunding campaign. We're starting with just the customers who purchased that reward, but soon this will be a feature other will be able to access, too. Work has also begun on the Docker file, which was another crowdfunding reward.

We're currently doing a lot of information gathering and research for the upcoming product roadmapping. We're going through the entire archive of the Loomio Community and picking out all the amazing suggestions and idea you all have come up with over the last two years. Guidance and feedback from our community is incredibly important.

That's all for right now - more soon!

ST

Sean Tilley Fri 16 May 2014 5:46PM

On a slightly unrelated note, you peeps ought to consider engaging our community on Diaspora!

A good portion of our users love you for the help you've given to our project, and I'm sure more than a few people would be thrilled to start their own Loomio groups, too.

You've already got a Diaspora account, I think a lot of good could come from it. :)

AI

Alanna Irving Wed 21 May 2014 6:06AM

Update 21 May

Another update a bit soon after the last one, because we're heading off for the Loomio Retreat tomorrow morning so our week in the office is cut short.

This week we've been preparing for the retreat and AGM, including putting together an annual report, preparing for a reshuffle of the Board, and bringing in new cooperative members. We've also been doing more learning about how to work together in the new internal structure we've adopted post-crowdfunding, which will be a lot more clear and transparent (case in point, these updates!)

The development team has delivered two custom Loomio groups (with the user's own logo, etc) as promised as rewards from the crowdfunding campaign. We're still focused on information gathering for Roadmapping, which we'll be communicating a lot more about soon. Suffice to say, feedback from the community will be absolutely key!

@benjaminknightloom is getting ready for his upcoming trip to San Francisco and New York, May 29-June 11. He'ss be speaking at the Personal Democracy Forum, and meeting with a lot of people over there. We've also had @mjkaplan in town, a Loomio team member normally based in the US who is visiting us in New Zealand right now.

AI

Alanna Irving Thu 29 May 2014 11:10PM

Update 30 May

We've just published a blog post to all supporters - check it out!

The Loomio retreat was pretty amazing. We reconnected as a team and confirmed the restructuring we've done internally to be ready to deliver all the crowdfunding campaign promises. We had an AGM and named 4 cooperative members for the next phase of the board: @vivienmaidaborn @matthewbartlett @benjaminknightloom @michaelelwoodsmith - we will also be looking for a couple of external board members (specifically with expertise in scaling open source projects) over the next period but they are not confirmed.

@benjaminknightloom is over in the US right now presenting at the Personal Democracy Forum and meeting with social impact funders and other strategic people.

We got some great community feedback about group privacy settings, and the update to that is currently being QA'd. The first public custom Loomio group has been released, a collaboration with Auckland Council.

AI

Alanna Irving Fri 13 Jun 2014 1:46AM

Update 13 June

Sorry for the delay in updates! We should be back on track to update weekly now. Many of us were away at the Enspiral retreat but now we're back!

New group privacy options have been released, as well as the group identity feature. The explosion of the Internet Party group has been an opportunity to learn what's needed to help groups scale up effectively. And the public collaborative roadmap is now live, heralding a new phase of transparency and community engagement around development.

@benjaminknightloom is back from his trip to America, where he presented at the Personal Democracy Forum and had a lot of meetings with strategic supporters. We're looking more seriously into the idea of pursuing social impact funding thanks to some interest from potential funders. We're doing work to develop the Loomio business plan and what it might be like over the next few years. All of this is to ensure the long term thriving of the project and to allow us to scale up.

We're officially welcoming two new cooperative members, @mjkaplan and @michaelelwoodsmith ! We're very excited to have them with us as members.

And we surpassed 20,000 registered user accounts this week! Pretty awesome milestone.

AI

Alanna Irving Thu 19 Jun 2014 11:15PM

Update 20 June

The Loomio Roadmap continues to be actively updated - you can see what's in the pipeline and what's been released, and vote on feature ideas.

New this week is the updated feature around editing content - you can now edit comments and proposals until there has been activity after you, and there are new options to allow and disallow editing of comments and discussions on a per-group basis. And there's an updated daily summary email, Yesterday on Loomio.

Check out a couple recent pretty awesome blog posts:

AI

Alanna Irving Wed 25 Jun 2014 3:39AM

Update 25 June

@benjaminknightloom 's amazing presentation from the Personal Democracy Forum has been published - must watch! Also see @alijacs 's incredible poetry slam inspired by Loomio.

We're seeking user input about participation permissions - who can start and contribute to proposals and discussions.

A lot of work is going on behind the scenes with exciting potential partnerships and projects, as well as further development on the Loomio business model (nothing specific to announce yet, but all good stuff). Look out for the monthly update to Loomio crowdfunding supporters later this week as well.

AI

Alanna Irving Thu 3 Jul 2014 10:31PM

Update 4 July

Check out the recent Update to Supporters - a roundup of the highlights form the last month in Loomio-land.

This week we had our first meeting with our new Board, named at the last AGM in May. Right now it consists of 4 Loomio members. Soon we'll be looking at adding some external directors as well, with expertise in open source software and scaling internationally.

As per the roadmap, several features are in progress:
* subscribe to and reply to discussion by email
* email docker
* language dialects
* beta mobile responsive interface (Elias)

Loomio was mentioned in Al Jazeera!

AI

Alanna Irving Fri 18 Jul 2014 6:55AM

Update 18 July

Loomio is a founding venture in the Social Enterprise Greenhouse in Providence Rhode Island - our first US office where @mjkaplan is working!

Reply by email is live! You can now reply via email to notifications of new discussions and @mentions, and your reply will automatically be posted on Loomio. And the URL of all public groups is now a usable RSS feed.

AI

Alanna Irving Sun 10 Aug 2014 9:58PM

We missed some updates, so here's a roundup!

Don't miss the July Update with new features, partnerships, media, and metrics.

Hot off the press: A profile on the blog of one of our awesome open source developers, @jameskiesel

We've been doing continuous improvement on our internal processes, like employment contracts and good governance processes between the Board and Members. We've also been taking steps to clarify our approach to consulting work (a lot of people ask for Loomio's help around facilitation and consultation).

In terms of the software, we've upgraded to Rails 4, released keyboard shortcuts, and implemented dialect support. Serbian and Italian are now live! We've also been working to improve processes around the Roadmap and make sure everything we need to develop is on there.

We're stoked to have @hannahsalmon working with us part time now focused on user support and improving onboarding and help, and @mixirving focused on translation support.

Another big focus right now is on metrics - using the right tools and measuring the right things to help us figure out the most critical points in the user journey to work on.

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