loomio

Agree completely. I understand the deeper issues and concepts being discussed - because I'm the kind of person that happily takes time out of my weekend to re-read Stallman essays from 2007. However, as a SaaS startup trying to communicate with non-geek end users about our AGPL-licensed FLOSS product, we have found the misunderstandings caused by the term "free" insurmountable.

Our choices are to use "open source", which more or less gets it across to lay people completely unaware of the subtleties, use "free software" and then launch into some long-form explanation of why we also charge money (of course anyone can grab the code for free and run their own instance but most of our customers don't care about any of that), or say FLOSS or Libre and it's totally unintelligible to most people and they stop paying attention before we've gotten anywhere.

Unfortunately I don't think this problem will be constructively progressed until it evolves past the realm of geeks arguing about it amongst themselves, and actually is approached as a marketing issue. Perhaps the reason the debate is still festering is there hasn't been much alignment of incentives between the marketers and the geeks to work together on it, because most software companies don't try to mutually hold the values of Free Software and commercial profit. But we won't see Free Software and its underpinning values go mainstream until that happens, and I think it would be good for everyone if it did.

Did you even read the article? The author self-identifies as a feminist. Your implication that this is about feminism vs not-feminism is simplistic and missing the point.

We got rejected for www.loomio.org - oh well.

To be competitive, we need to build diverse organizations where people have different strengths.

Exactly. And if your hiring process locks out someone who does not have a certain strength (such as negotiation), which is not directly relevant to their job (such as programming), you will miss out on people who could have great skills in the area that is relevant to what you're hiring for. This is unfair to potentially strong candidates, and bad for your company.

People are very willing to admit that most interviewing processes simply select for people who are good at interviewing, and tests select for people who are good at test taking - these methods sometimes overlap with what you're actually trying to measure, but are obviously flawed in many ways. The same goes for negotiating, which may have a tangential correlation with being an effective programmer in some contexts, but certainly not very directly.

Ellen Pao is trying to send a signal to people who are good at what they do, but put off or intimidated by playing hardball over salaries. If you like negotiating, you're not the intended audience.

There's plenty of discussion on Hacker News about people management, culture-building, social issues, work-life balance, personal development, etc. Usually as it relates to tech and startups, but that's to be expected.

Something is going on in Spain. You can track the Indignados movement through Occupy and now Podemos. We're seeing a parallel movement in technology there to what's going on in politics with the Podemos movement [0] - decentralised, grassroots, bottom-up. It's deeply exciting to track these digital and cultural trends together and imagine a new paradigm emerging in society.

We make an open source tool for distributed collaboration, and our userbase is now overwhelmingly in Spain. This emerged organically. It seems to be very fertile ground right now for distributed communication and democracy. I would advise anyone making software in this space to get a Spanish version out there and join the wave. I wonder about how it will spread to the rest of the Spanish-speaking world and join up with related tools and movements coming out of South America, like DemocracyOS.

[0] http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/spain-politics-via-re...

This American Life did a fantastic piece on acetaminophen, how easy it is to overdose on it, and the story behind why it's still thought of as so safe. Interesting listening on this topic!

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/505/u...

I am excited about it because when I play the whole world map, it seems like every single point is in the Australian outback! This adds more variety.

Maybe worst for me personally was most all straight forwardly representational work was labeled "illustrative" and discounted as "commercial."

While I find the "deskilling" of arts to be troubling, and experienced frustration at the lack of technical education as a fine arts student, this line made me realise that what might be deep underneath this is a rejection by those in search of "authentic" art in the face of rampant commodification by advertisers.

In a world where the true human value of art is judged by the proxy of commercial value, and many of the greatest talents are using their abilities not to further human culture but to sell products, it's not irrational for people to seek art that cannot be commodified. It's a collective search for authenticity that's unfortunately flailing and grasping at straws instead, of unpacking the deeper causes caught up with larger social and economic currents.

Yes! I wish I understood how to approach it as a hybrid social enterprise.

Not at the moment, but it's something we're working toward! We will have an API later this year, and embeddable Loomio decisions is on our roadmap.[0]

Of course as an open source project, if you had a strong use case you are more than welcome to jump in and build what you need it to do! [1]

[0] http://www.loomio.org/roadmap [1] http://github.com/loomio/loomio

Yes! I would love to get in touch and talk more. I will contact you directly. Best of luck with pol.is! The world really needs better ways to make decisions and we're going to need all kinds of complementary tools.

Really nice! I really appreciate the focus on good design and clear presentation of data. Something seeming this "simple" is not actually simple! Well done. I spend most of my life considering online tools for consensus building, and this is one of the more innovative and well executed I have seen.

I would love to see modules for this kind of non-binary polling in our open source decision-making tool[0]. I have never been a fan of straight polling because it misses some critical aspects of the discussion by pre-supposing the options, and most issues are not best approached with a conflict-based method of "A vs B, one wins". In fact the real answer is often a synthesis or evolution beyond where anyone started. Many of our users have requested polls to do temperature checks or decide quickly between options, but I have resisted because I don't want to flatten discussions into only a limited set of options that might leave out important aspects. I much prefer your approach!

[0] http://www.loomio.org

$12.99 to rent a digital movie? As we say here in New Zealand, "Yeah, nah." Considering most people here also have capped data, we'd essentially be paying twice.

“Taken together, these results suggest that women are likely wearing cosmetics to appeal to the mistaken preferences of others.”

The results suggest no such thing. This is a massive assumption. This article misses the most obvious and likely answer of all - women are wearing makeup for themselves and don't give a damn what anyone else thinks!

I'm a bit late to the party but I wanted to mention that in addition to being a tool created to support the kind of collaborative decision-making that happens in cooperative models (which they are using it for at CoLab, as solarlion kindly mentioned already) Loomio [0] is itself structured as a cooperative with 12 worker-members and growing.

Loomio is part of the larger Enspiral ecosystem (as te_chris already mentioned), which is a network of startups doing business differently, with a social good focus and also upending internal organisation. We're innovating new ways to do core business processes in collaborative, distributed ways. Loomio is an example of that for decision-making, and we're also doing the same in budgeting, strategy setting, governance, and more.

We're quite passionate about the cooperative model and collaborative process design and are happy to talk more in-depth with anyone who is interested.

[0] http://www.loomio.org [1] http://www.enspiral.com

As someone who often appreciates the comments as much or more than the content - yes! I often come across articles in places other than Reddit or HN and wish I could do a "reverse lookup" to see where it might have been submitted just so I can read the comments.

If you're serious about learning Japanese, you need to move there. I'm not sure there is any other way to properly understand all the uses of "kakeru" besides simply hearing them all hundreds of times to the point where you just "feel" when it's right to use it. There's just no substitute for immersion and pure exposure.

I studied Japanese at one of the most demanding University programmes for two years intensively (an hour of class, another hour or two of language lab time, another two or three hours studying PER DAY) but I honestly did not really start internalizing any of it until I lived it every day. It was watching TV, hanging out in bars, hearing the subway announcements, and texting my friends that actually let me become fluent.

It's like any other skill, actually... could you learn painting by reading about it but not using a brush all the time? Could you learn gymnastics watching demonstrations but never trying to do a flip? I'm not saying you don't practice - it sounds like you've worked very hard - but immersion is a completely different kind of experience. If there's any way you can, don't give up on your dream Move to Japan, even just for a year. Once you really internalize the language, it will be a part of you forever.

Hey, thanks so much! We really appreciate the encouragement.

Thanks so much! Right from the start, Loomio has been a community-driven project, and we only exist because of everyone's support.

It is indeed inspired by consensus decision-making, although the Loomio platform can work for various decision-making protocols not just 100% consensus. It just nudges groups away from strict majority-rules or one-way communication (polls with pre-defined options), which leads to a lot more meaningful participation and better outcomes for groups.

A big focus for the next phase is making installing your own instance a lot easier. We're going to release a docker file for Loomio 1.0. But just in case you weren't clear, there is also a cloud-hosted version that anyone can use without technical expertise.

Hi, thanks for your comments. We launched a functional and useful alpha in early 2012, followed by a public beta in 2013, which was open to everyone to use. 15,000 people have already signed up and people are using the software right now all over the world. You're welcome to use the Loomio protoype right now, either the hosted version in the cloud, or install your own instance.

Set up a Loomio prototype group here: https://www.loomio.org/group_requests/new or grab the code from http://github.com/loomio/loomio

So if we're talking about the beta prototype, characterising us as "unable to launch" isn't fair. What the crowdfunding campaign is for is building Loomio 1.0, a redesign and expansion of the core idea we've validated.

The stretch goals would allow us to unlock matching funding from the New Zealand government, including taking on some big technical challenges. You are right that these are not yet well-defined, since we're still a ways off from starting to work on them. But there are serious challenges around scaling up meaningful online discussion and decision-making to large groups that I don't believe anyone has really solved yet. We want to take them on.

We've hung in there for 2 years already, and put together an amazing team. The incredible support of over 1000 people is now going to allow us to release Loomio 1.0 later this year. We're not going anywhere!!

So sorry it leaves a bad taste. If there's anything else you'd like to know that might help you understand it better, please let us know! We're a genuinely earnest and well-meaning group trying to build something we think can help people.

We were humbled to be able to support you, and it's reaffirmed our belief in the importance of translations and accessibility in the app. All the best to you in Taiwan!

Thanks to everyone for checking out Loomio! If anyone has questions, please feel free to ask away (several of the team members have answered a few already).

Thank you so much! Your support means a lot :)

We've tried to optimise load times but we will try to improve them further.

The article focuses on an example of a guy who had totally proved himself with past success, and yet still encountered ageism.

Here's how he's introduced:

The most impressive entrepreneur in Scheinman’s portfolio who hadn’t caught on was a fortysomething Boston-based engineer named Nick Stamos. In the early 2000s, Stamos had been the chief technology officer at one start-up that eventually hit a market value of $1 billion. He later co-founded another that earned tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue. Everyone Stamos had ever worked with raved about his technical chops, his relentless salesmanship, his flare for innovation. “The picture was remarkable,” Scheinman says.

Oh yes, this must be why leadership positions in business, government, and all areas of life are dominated by women. Oh wait...

We would welcome contributors at Loomio! It's a simple tool for anyone, anywhere to participate in decisions that affect them. We have a big vision of a more democratic world at every level.

http://www.loomio.org

Here is the full quote:

People will forget what you said, People will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

- Maya Angelou

Great management is about great delegation and great empowerment. What they are NOT involved in is as, or more, important than what they are involved in.

As someone who spends all my time thinking about decision-making group dynamics, I thought this excerpt was totally spot-on:

---------- The Big Decision Meeting. Scott created this after recognizing all the angst around her staff meetings. Everyone wanted to be included because they felt like big decisions were getting made there, but this was hardly ever the case. “Make fewer decisions in your staff meeting and create a second meeting explicitly to deal with important decisions,” she says. “Delegate these decisions to people who are closer to the information.”

Consider using your staff meeting to set the agenda for the big decision meeting. Identify the three most important decisions that need to get made that week, and who should make those decisions. Who is closest to the work involved? “This is how you push decision-making into the facts,” she says.

Citing James March’s book A Primer on Decision Making, she recommends that managers exclude themselves from big decisions as much as possible. “Somehow people’s egos get invested in making decisions,” Scott says. “If they get left out, they feel almost a loss of personhood. So you get ego-based decisions instead of fact-based decisions. The more you push yourself and your managers out of the process, the better your decisions will be.”

Most of all, don’t let decisions get pushed up. “A lot of times you see decisions get kicked up to the more senior level, and so they get made by people who happen to be sitting around a certain table, not the people who know the facts. Don’t let this happen.”