Rory Ridley-Duff is a reader in cooperatives and social enterprise at Sheffield Business School, director of Social Enterprise Europe, and founder of the FairShares Association. They use Loomio to model their governance structure online, for effective, equitable stakeholding.

FairShares Association is a loose network of educators, researchers, and consultants  interested in multi-stakeholder co-ops. We’ve got people in France, Australia, New Zealand, and now in America as well.

There is no way of all meeting face to face, realistically. We use Loomio to keep our discussions alive.

The philosophy of FairShares is to grow more direct forms of democracy (over representative democracy). Because Loomio can have nested groups, you can have high levels of participation from people who are loosely connected, but you can also have people who are on governing bodies.

We like the combination of very open forums where you have have ‘one person one vote’ and open debates, but a group of members could also be making a decision around a change to the constitution, for example.

I think you make better decisions when you have inclusive, democratic processes. Particularly when it’s structured the way that Loomio structures it.

In the European project, we wanted to engage the research team with the wider network. That was a project on work integration in social enterprise, and there were five countries involved. The fact that you could translate text on Loomio was appealing, because people in different countries could write in their own language.

I believe in the integration of users and members of the community into an organisation that has substantial worker involvement or worker control. FairShares is a philosophy for doing that. It can act as a guide to the way you actually constitute your organisation, but I think, more powerfully, it’s a set of principles.

You can have a store who recognises who the founders, users, producers, and supporters. That’s the way that FairShares looks at the world; we organise around those four interest groups. We’ve set up our Loomio to model our governance, with different subgroups, and everybody in the general assembly.

What Loomio does, which email doesn’t do, is give you an audit trail of your decisions. It enables you to function like you’ve got a general meeting on all the time. All of the members get proposals, and they get time to consider and vote on the issues.

Loomio enables people whose voices were normally not heard to exercise their voices more effectively. People who were usually very dominant weren’t as dominant when it was being run through Loomio.

I’m quite hopeful for a technology-enabled sharing economy, where the organisations are cooperatively owned, rather than being owned by absentee investors. We will gradually work toward a genuinely participatory democracy at work. It’s the marriage of technology and the thinking of FairShares that will create the ability for different constituent groups to really bargain with each other as equals.

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Most of us are allergic to finance because it doesn’t work for us. It closes down possibilities and creativity. We have the idea that it could be different, that it could be creative.

Our first attempt was to create an activist hedge fund, to give people with ?€60 access to the same mechanisms that rich people use to get even richer. We suck value from Wall Street and promote a profit sharing model, where a percent goes to yourself and a percent to commons projects. The membership decides where to divert funds to.

Although we’re about 600 big as a co-op, there’s probably about 10 people really driving the day to day routine tasks. We could foresee that we were all going to burn out.

At first we were running the meetings physically, in Helsinki, which of course meant only a percent of the oroganisation turned up. We decided to use Loomio to encourage more participation.

We went from 10 members participating to 200-300 actively participating, within one year.

Broadly, we wanted the support of the wider membership, because we can’t do this alone. Loomio was awesome for that because it allows a multi-faceted conversation, whether you want to contribute in a larger way or just put a thumbs up.

It really gave us kind of a temperature check of the organisation, of whether we were thinking in sync with the people in the co-op.

One of the main propositions of Robin Hood is breaking the taboo of who can manage monetary flows, on Wall Street for example. It’s a monstrous idea that artists and hackers could go and do that – but we have.

Did we accept that as the main legacy we leave behind? Or did we want to proactively, together as a community, keep trying to break that egg and open up economic space for more people? I can’t over emphasise how important that decision was.

Some of us could have said, ‘Right, we’re going to go hack away on another project, whatever it might be’. But we decided to stick together with the wider co-op and go in that direction.

It was really make or break. And I really don’t think we could have done that over email, which is how we were doing it before. How do you have a conversation over email with 600 people?

When you’ve seen something work so well – and so many of your peers, communities, and networks are using a tool and it’s being of benefit – it opens up what we call a ‘space’. We’re working with economic ‘space’.

What Loomio has done is open up the organisational possibilities for people working together.

You can join the Robin Hood Co-op yourself with €60.

Originally published in the Loomio blog.

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The P2P Foundation is a global network of researchers in open design, open hardware, free software – all kinds of systems that are open to contribution and create a common resource. They build collective knowledge, and explore how to develop livelihoods in a new social and economic paradigm.

The P2P Foundation team members are individually extremely productive, and skilled at working autonomously. They continually deliver value when collaborating in a format like a wiki. But they found that decision-making about taking collective action was different.

When we have to do things together that really require more high-level coordination, and more detail, we tended to turn in circles.

They found themselves having discussions that would not reach a clear conclusion. Then six months later, the same topic would arise again. Certain activities with more complexity proved hard to coordinate informally.

Loomio helps us to say, ‘We discussed this. We came to an agreement.’ It’s easy to use, and allows us to work in a non-hierarchical way? ?without being chaotic.

Making a decision on Loomio makes it legitimate, and allows the group to clearly delegate responsibility for execution. Those carrying out the implementation know the whole group is behind them.

You get a mandate from your community— that’s what I like about it.

For Michel, the most important thing about Loomio is that it’s useful. This is why he’s seen it spread virally throughout peer-production communities, without the need for marketing. It resonates because of what he calls values-sensitive design.

Our values — our democratic values —are in that software.

Despite being the foremost librarian and chronicler of open-source collaboration practices, Michel himself is a researcher, not a technologist. Yet he finds Loomio to be user-friendly.

I’m not so tech-oriented. For me, it’s a tool. I want to be a driver; I don’t want to be a mechanic. I never had any issue with Loomio.

The P2P Foundation uses a large range of digital communication tools, producing an extensive wiki and an online magazine, along with blog posts, videos, and other kinds of web media. But they found that decision-making is something that requires a purpose-designed tool to be effective.

Talking together, we could already do. But the combination of talking together and decision-making is what Loomio has.

From his vantage point, Michel sees Loomio as part of a much larger movement toward permission-less collaboration, open cooperativism, entrepreneurial coalitions, and commons communities.

My dream is that Loomio is just one of a set of tools that could be used by these new productive communities. There should be a library of tools that don’t compete for the mass of people who want to entertain themselves, but are really for serious people who are producing common goods. Loomio is going to be a core to their tool set.

Michel recently came to visit Loomio during his New Zealand speaking tour. He calls himself “the librarian of the movement,” traveling the world connecting diverse groups working in highly collaborative P2P ways.

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