Loomio
Sat 28 Dec 2019 6:09PM

Loomio free tier coming to an end

R RobJN Public Seen by 39

I have a message from Loomio saying that they are closing the free tier and that we will need to start paying.

The reason we set up Loomio was for it's decision making tools. My own experience had been that talk-gb discussions often go off topic and are hard to determine whether any consensus was ever found. There is also a question about whether mailing lists are the right forum to reach the wider audience that we should aspire to (although I note that asking people to sign up to Loomio is another hurdle).

We've had some success with Loomio's decision making tools, for example in picking AGM locations, Quarterly Projects and our annual strategy. Use has not been as extensive as I had hoped.

We have some options here:

  1. Continue to use Loomio at a cost of USD 107 per year (USD 1 per member as we get the volunteer group discount). I am writing to Loomio to ask for further discounts given that we don't have 107 active members.

  2. Investigate a self host solution - after all Loomio is open source. I looked at this and is not something I can personally do. We need root access to a server, something which we don't currently have. https://github.com/loomio/loomio-deploy

  3. Club together with OSMF. We know they use Loomio for just their board members. I have sent an email to find out what their plans are.

  4. Call it quits and leave Loomio for something else.

As an aside, there is some early work to get more features added to the core openstreemap.org website. I cannot see this being complete by the end of January. See https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/pull/2390

EB

Edward Bainton Tue 7 Jan 2020 8:17AM

Reluctant to go the forum route. Maintenance, spammers, moderation etc.

Is there some kind of programming magic that could give us a forum on openstreetmap that was just for OSM-UK? I'm thinking some kind of permissions system so our current logins are given permission to post to a UK-only section. That deals with the spammers, hopefully, and maybe wouldn't need more moderation than here. But yes, maintenance by someone admitting people.

With the amount of notice we have, I'm inclined to keep with Loomio at least in the short term.

Makes sense. Perhaps we need a self-imposed deadline to find the alternative. Even though I like Loomio, I'm definitely in favour of reducing the number of OSM channels: it reaches comic proportions.

HW

Harry Wood Wed 8 Jan 2020 1:16AM

Just to repeat, there is a UK forum on forum.openstreetmap.org

It's fairly quiet. Nobody posted in 2020 yet. ... let me fix that ... There we go. A message for you :-)

EB

Edward Bainton Mon 13 Jan 2020 10:36PM

Having read Rob's message below I should clarify that by OSM-UK here I meant members of the OSM-UK org, rather than all OSMers based in the UK.

So same qn re perhaps having a closed space on the existing forum.

R

RobJN Sun 12 Jan 2020 4:09PM

I sense part of the attraction of switching to different channels is to ditch all those curmudgeonly old-timers hey?

Not at all. We wanted to avoid "taking over" an existing channel as whilst setting up OSM UK was reasonably popular it wasn't universally popular. There is also a benefit of having a separate area for OSM UK at is is clearer what topics people want OSM UK (the organisation) to look at versus the topics people are happy for UK OSMers (the community) to progress.

As noted, we recognise that "yet another portal" creates problems, but without the occasional review you risk missing out as things change. I think the 15 years of OSM is a sufficient period to have a review (which is what we did). Whilst we are not bowled over by Loomio, we do like the fact that it is open source, developed by a social enterprise and has a strong focus on decision making tools. This last bit is a way for us to test ideas with the community beyond just written responses. We don't use it all the time but when we do it is very helpful.

As for a way froward, we chatted about this at January's meeting and decided that we would continue with Loomio for another year and fund this out of our current reserves. Time pressure was a major factor at play - it takes time to assess, agree and communicate an alternative (even longer if changes are needed first) and we felt it was better to give ourselves ample time to do this rather than rush a decision in the next few days.

As for what we do in the during these 12 months, it feels like a good place to start is to re-assess the needs of our users. I can share my wishes (open, enables effective decision making, slow - i.e. people have time to read and respond when ready versus the feeling of needing to be available all the time in some instant chat services) but worth checking with others too.

FWIW I would like to see more features rolled in to openstreetmap.org in general. In my view any communication channel outside of osm.org will be harder for people to find and raises the barrier to wider participation.