Work Together (Archive)

The collaborative decision-making tool designed by a worker cooperative

You may have heard of Loomio. The name might sound familiar to the ones using collaborative platforms. A hint: it’s called Loomio, like a loom for weaving diverse perspectives together. Yes. It is indeed an online tool for decision-making, built by a team of technologists, activists and cooperators in New Zealand.

26 May 2015

The mission of the enterprise is not surprising, as the creators themselves are members of a worker cooperative having the same name. “We’re a mission-driven organisation with a social purpose at our core: Loomio exists to make it easy for anyone, anywhere, to participate in decisions that affect their lives”, announces their website.

Loomio emerged from the need to make inclusive group decisions during the Occupy movement in 2011. “We experienced the transformative potential of collaborative decision-making, as well as its severe limitations: if people have to be in the same place at the same time to participate, it can never scale. We set out to build a solution to this problem: using the Internet to give people an easy way to make good decisions together, wherever they are.”

Now, more than 75,000 people have made more than 25,000 decisions on Loomio.