Loomio
Fri 25 Jan 2013 7:13PM

Anybody should be able to sign up on Loomio

TS Tom Scott Public Seen by 86

This is obviously not a Diaspora-only problem, but I'm really sick of having to tell people to stop using GH Issues as a soapbox. That's what Loomio is for. The problem is, Loomio has a rather silly sign-up process and is "closed" to the public (but Sean has unlimited invites?). I think there needs to be an easier way for the public to get on here and submit their feedback, rather than using Github Issues, which people are forced to do since it's the best way to get the contributors' attention.

So what should we do about this? In my eyes, we have a number of options:

1.) We could run our own Loomio. Loomio is open-source and it can't be too much trouble to set up on Heroku. Only trouble is, who pays for the Heroku instance after we inevitably get over 10,000 rows in the DB?

2.) I think the only other option is somehow forcing Loomio to open sign ups. This might be hard, and might go against their own philosophy. We love Loomio and they've been nothing but helpful in getting us migrated here. Also, Loomio is an AWESOME application and I'd like to do everything in my power to make sure it stays alive and we don't overstay our welcome here. Either that, or we/someone could create a special form that lets people sign up themselves but they can only see the Diaspora groups.

I don't know what the best solution will be, exactly. But we need some sort of solution. Because I'm tired of deleting 60 emails a day from fit-bear. ;)

ST

Sean Tilley Fri 25 Jan 2013 7:15PM

@jonlemmon @richarddbartlett Any suggestions on this?

G

goob Fri 25 Jan 2013 7:32PM

Anyone who's got a Loomio account can invite other people, as I understand it. The reason that sign-up isn't open is because Loomio itself is in its infancy, so the founders of Loomio have kept access invite-only until they're ready to launch Loomio properly and, I guess, until they have the funding to buy enough servers to open up sign-up.

In principle, yes I agree with you, but it's not an issue of Diaspora keeping access closed - it's to do with the stage of development of Loomio itself.

(Who came up with the name Loomio? It sounds daft.)

RDB

Richard D. Bartlett Sat 26 Jan 2013 6:39AM

Hi Tom! I'm not speaking as an 'official Loomio rep' here or anything, but here's my take:

Open sign-ups are certainly on the horizon. How distant that horizon is depends on a combination of strategy (responding to demand while still scaling sustainably) and the resources available (design & development time + hosting costs).

Loomio development progresses in iterative steps, so it would be worth thinking about what kind of feature could be implemented that makes it easier for people to join, without necessarily going all the way to fully open sign-up.

Unfortunately my brain has seen too much sun today to come up with any suggestions of what that interim solution might look like :)

I've taken this question to the Loomio Community - we'll see if the hive mind comes up with any elegant solutions. You're all more than welcome to join that group and weigh in with your thoughts :)

F

Flaburgan Sat 26 Jan 2013 10:55AM

@tomscott

First, everyone can invite, I often do it. So, each time you talk to someone about Loomio, just say "give my your email by PM and I'll invite you".

Second, one problem is to create (again!) another account on another platform. Think about it, if you want to contribute to Diaspora, you need 1 an account on Diaspora 2 an account on diaspora-project 3 an account on github 4 an account on loomio. This is too many accounts ! What can we do about that ? Use Persona ! @seantilleycommunitymanager already implemented it on diaspora-project. If we turn the pods on Persona providers and if we convince Loomio guys to use Persona as the authentication system, it will be only one account creation for three website. And we can try to talk about Persona to github Team, Mozilla uses github a lot, so, if it's Mozilla who asks...

ST

Sean Tilley Sun 27 Jan 2013 5:29PM

@flaburgan : Persona solves a great problem of requiring signing on to multiple sites with one email, but the problem is that it still requires the same amount of user accounts. Persona is a user authentication tool, it's not necessarily a "One account to log into everything" type of solution.

F

Flaburgan Sun 27 Jan 2013 5:32PM

Yeah of course you still need an account, but it can be create automatically the first time you log in with Persona, filling only your email address. This would be completely transparent for the user, and he even find his profile picture if he uses gravatar.

M

matl Sun 27 Jan 2013 10:52PM

Maybe we could solve the problem with the multiple accounts during the registration.

For example: A user creates a new diaspora account. During the registration process we will ask the user if he wants to take part in different decisions on diaspora. If he answers the question with "yes", we will automatically create an account (with the same email and password) on Loomio and of course we will add the user to the different standard groups.

JL

Jon Lemmon Mon 28 Jan 2013 5:40AM

This is totally on the priority list for Loomio, it's just a matter of us getting the time to implement this (unless one of you kind folk wish to do it =D).

What Sean and I discussed a couple months ago was giving the option for Loomio groups to be auto-joinable.

It could look something like this: We allocate Diaspora a group limit of something like 500 members for now (just to keep server load down for now). Then we make it so anyone who wants to can automatically sign up and join the Diaspora Loomio group without having to go through any sort of "approval process".

The only downside here would be if a whole bunch of people decided to sign up to Diaspora's Loomio group who didn't actually plan on using it and then your member count got maxed out. However, I don't really see this being a problem, and if it was we could probably just increase the amount of members you're allowed (or you guys could switch back to invite only).

The other issue here is making sub-groups auto-joinable, but this could probably be implemented at the same time.

Anyway, we certainly will implement this feature, it's just a matter of when. If one of the diaspora developers feels strongly enough to actually implement the feature themselves I'd be happy to assist along the way. Otherwise, we will certainly implement it, it just might take some time for us to get to it.

Oh also, integrating with other existing authentication systems is on the cards as well. Again, it's just a matter of having the development resources to allocate to the task.