With the latest release of Loomio you can define your own templates and workflows, then make them available for others in your organization to use.
This is one of the most significant feature releases we’ve made in a long while, and we’re excited to see what people will do with this new functionality.
- Proposals are now fully customizable.
- We’ve introduced two new poll types:
- Sense check is a simple way to get feedback on a decision before things get finalized.
- Opt-in is a way to ask people to volunteer or participate.
- You can create custom poll types with the terminology and rules of your organization.
- Describe a decision-making process with a thread template, so it’s easy for others to copy and use.
- Start a demo group at any time to see how Loomio works and test features in a sandbox.
Michael has put together a video to walk through it all, which you can watch here:
I’ll do my best to explain the features in more detail:
Proposals are fully customizable
You define what the voting options are
One of the most common questions we get asked is how to change the voting options in a proposal. Now you can change them however you like.
For example: Change ‘Agree’ to ‘Consent’, remove ‘Abstain’, maybe add something else. It’s entirely up to you.
[picture of poll form]
Define what voting options actually mean
Elaborate on what voting options mean with the ‘meaning’ field. You can use this to explain what it means to agree and when it’s appropriate to object. The meaning of an option is displayed right under the name in the voting form:
[picture of voting form]
Encourage more constructive feedback with the ‘Reason prompt’.
Now you can define a question (or prompt) for voters to respond to when they cast their vote. As someone votes, they’ll see this prompt above the “reason” field on the vote form. For example: If someone votes “Disagree” you can ask them to explain what changes are necessary for them to update their vote to “Agree”.
[animated giff of chosing agree or disagree in the voting form]
New poll types: Sense Check and Opt-in
We’ve learned a lot about decision-making processes over the years. In general the thing they have in common is one or more rounds of feedback before a final vote. Sense Check is a way to get feedback, clarify and improve an idea, before moving to a proposal. This is less stressful and more constructive than proposing a decision without the warm up. In some cases you might find that a sense check is the only tool you need to feel condfient to make a decision.
Opt-in is a way to call for volunteers or participants. You can define a target number of people you’re seeking. You can ask people to join a working group, or RSVP for the staff social event.
We’ve put together a guide on Loomio Help: Simple decision process, which shows how you can use a Thread, Sense Check and Proposal to make a decision with your group.
Create custom poll types for your group
So, what if you don’t call it a “Proposal” but something else? And what if you only want to reveal the votes after it has closed? Well now you can define your own custom poll types and save them into your group, where they’ll be available for anyone to use.
Thread templates make it easy for people to follow a workflow
For example: We’re are of a number of self-managing organizations using something called the Role Advice Process. It’s a way for people to get feedback on their role within the organization and propose changes.
Simplified for the sake of explaining templates, it goes something like this:
- Explain your current role, how it’s working out and how you feel about it (a new thread)
- Invite mentors to support you through the process (opt-in poll)
- Draft a new role description based on what you’ve learned and what you’d like to change (Sense Check)
- Based on the feedback, repeat as necessary.
- Propose a change with a final role description. (Proposal)
In Loomio, a thread template wraps all these individual steps up into a workflow including example content to make it easy to copy.
A template is just a thread with the template setting ticked. So it’s not a whole new thing, it’s just a way of identifying threads which are great examples, and making them easy to copy.
When people click “New thread” in your group, they’ll be presented with your templates as starting points to choose from.
Learn Loomio with our demo group: The Oatmilk Co-op
Learning by example is often the best way to learn a tool, and we’ve noticed that successful Loomio groups tend to include someone who themselves was part of a Loomio group in the past.
The Oatmilk Co-op is a fictional organization that uses Loomio to make strategy decisions, stay up to date on news and announcemnts, and manage their membership. You’re welcome to become a member of this fictional organization and vote, comment, start threads or polls.
This is a sandbox that will be deleted in a week, so it’s safe to make a mess and just give things a go without creating a bunch of emails for members of your real group!
I totally encourage you to start one and have a poke around. My favourite piece of work in this release is Demo groups, just because it makes it easy to see Loomio in action and try things out.
Tip for new users: Set a password next time you sign in.
We’ve added a “set password” button to the normal login flow, so if you’re tired of requesting a code to sign in, you can set a password for next time.
We’re excited to see how you use these new features. If our users create templates that are useful to other organizations and groups, then we want to foster a community of practice on Loomio. We intend to create a resource where you can share your best templates with other organizations, to be forked and copied and used in new ways.
Other things on our roadmap include:
- Move loomio.org to loomio.com – you’ll hear about that soon.
- Email to group. Giving each group an email address you can forward conversations to start threads on Loomio.
- Collaborative editing. So loomio is a great place to take notes during meetings and collaborate on threads and proposals.
- Mobile app.
Let us know what you would like to see.
If you read all the way to the end, thank you. I hope you enjoyed the update and that you have a great day.
Best wishes from me and the Loomio team.
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