Early thoughts about Loomio

The tool called Loomio traces its roots to the Occupy movement. I found this striking, because Quinn Norton's Eulogy for Occupy reported how Occupy's decision-making had been captured by violent and abusive people:

Because the GA had no way to reject force, over time it fell to force. Proposals won by intimidation; bullies carried the day. What began as a way to let people reform and remake themselves had no mechanism for dealing with them when they didn’t. It had no way to deal with parasites and predators. It became a diseased process, pushing out the weak and quiet it had meant to enfranchise until it finally collapsed when nothing was left but predators trying to rip out each other’s throats.

 In a revealing discussion on a well-known bbs , some of the makers of Loomio interweave their own history with the rhetorical concerns of Occupy:

Hey Hugh - I'm one of the folks working on Loomio too.

In some respects, defining "inclusive" is the hardest question in the world. At Occupy we tried to say "we include everyone". It was a traumatic lesson to learn that is actually an impossible aim: when you include anyone, you include people who's behaviour excludes others.

So if you can't include everyone, how do you draw the boundary?

At Occupy the impossibility of that question proved fatal: almost all of the camps that were lucky enough to avoid the violent state suppression of jackbooted thugs eventually succumbed to that paradox.

I believe we can get closer to a solution if we reframe the question though. Instead of saying "let's include everyone", what happens if we say "let's include everyone that is affected by this decision"?

You can add more nuance to that principle and agree that a person's influence over a decision is in proportion to the degree to which it affects them.

If you can agree a set of interaction protocols that are a prerequisite to participation, and some high-level nonspecific aims, then you can actually start making progress.

Once you have that unifying banner agreed, you can keep decisions action-focussed. Personally, collective decision-making is infinitely more appealing to me when it is used to plan action, rather than trying to agree abstract theory!

I appreciate that the maker RichDecibels acknowledges some of the principle paradoxes of inclusion: does inclusion itself include some or all parts of exclusion? Are there mutually exclusive constituencies? The solution of Loomio  is simply: put it to a vote. If you find yourself wrangling mutually exclusive constituencies, then mandate some form of interaction that will force them to express the strength of their preferences.

The makers of Loomio settled on a handful of participation methods: proposal, dialogue, and tetralemmic voting. Yet they probably considered dozens of possible methods for expressing preferences.

• Proposal: Anyone can make a proposal that the rest of the group may ratify. Contrast this approach with the model of petitions.whitehouse.gov, which requires a critical mass to initiate action. Also contrast this direct democracy with a representative model, whereby a delegate, executive, or group can submit proposals to a group for a referendum or plebicite.
• Dialogue: Two modes of dialogue follow two types of groups. Standing public groups have dialogue that's explicitly public; invited private groups have dialogue that's less public. Contrast this approach to moderated forums, private chats, and meatspace meetings (on the less inclusive side of the spectrum) and wikipedia discussions (on the more inclusive side of the spectrum). By splitting dialogue into two tracks, Loomio can avoid the problem of trying to design a single perfect platform for every situation ever.
• Tetralemmic voting: Participants can vote to agree, abstain, disagree, and block. I've likened this to a tetralemma (yes, no, both, neither), but "block" functions more as a distributed veto. This is a powerful idea, because people traditionally express their disapproval with an election through low turnout or non-ballots (ballots left blank, marked as "none of the above," or otherwise non-compliant). I think that "block" is a more reliable indicator of disapproval than a quorum or a non-ballot. Furthermore, I appreciate that Loomio's voting system can support concurrent votes, as a necessary complement to "blocked" proposals.
  Contrast this with "preferential voting" or "approval voting." Both of these systems require completed lists of options, whereas Loomio enables a running vote that can be expanded as proposals rise or fall.

So does Loomio's system avoid the pitfalls of the General Assembly at Occupy? Not really. Quinn's piece identifies the weaknesses of the General Assembly as: insufficient accountability, irreconcilable constituencies, and bullies.

• There's zero accountability built into Loomio. Loomio does not itself control your group. So long as a key player rejects the decision-making process, that player has a unilateral veto over all decisions made on Loomio. And there may be plenty of valid reasons why someone might reject Loomio. Perhaps that person perceives herself on the other side of the racial digital divide, or perceives herself to have low digital literacy.
• As indicated above, a rebellious constituency can completely derail Loomio's implementation. In fact, Loomio seems to begin with the unstated premise that you begin with a fully formed group who buy into the process. That means each person is prepared to formulate the group's problems as a series of proposals, and their own objections as a series of rebuttals. That process requires a high degree of perceived self-efficacy in rhetoric and digital media.
• Bullies can still shut down the process. As we've seen in famous cases of revenge porn doxxing, people can still be bullied online. As Occupy shows, the only real solution is to disengage and cede control to the bullies: they'll eventually exhaust themselves.

I'd like to come back to this and consider the role of Loomio in the university classroom.