Loomio

Loomio began in 2011 inside Occupy Wellington's communications working group, when organizers looking for project software found nothing built for groups that decide things without a boss. Ben Knight, Richard Bartlett and three co-founders formed Loomio Cooperative, a worker-owned company under the Enspiral network, in 2012, and that cooperative still builds and hosts the project for groups that want board votes off a vendor's server.

Where Loomio fits

Loomio's closest open-source neighbor is Discourse: both run self-hosted threaded discussion groups with subgroups and moderation. Discourse stops at conversation — closing a thread does not record a decision, track a quorum, or ask people to agree, abstain, disagree or block before a proposal closes. Loomio adds that layer on the same kind of thread: a proposal opens, positions collect into a pie chart the group watches mid-discussion, and closing it writes a permanent outcome. Groups that pick Discourse for governance usually bolt on a poll plugin; Loomio ships the workflow built in.

For decisions that matter — a co-op asset sale, a union strike vote, a board's annual budget — where that record lives is not a footnote. Loomio's Docker image runs on infrastructure the group controls, so a vote's outcome and member names never pass through a third party's terms of service or a vendor's analytics pipeline. That matters to agencies and nonprofits handling sensitive votes, and to ops leads who would rather answer to their own retention policy than someone else's uptime. The tradeoff: self-hosting means running Postgres, Redis and a Node build step instead of trusting a SaaS provider.

What it does well

• Separates a position (agree, abstain, disagree, block) from open discussion, so a contentious thread still produces one visible outcome.
• Keeps discussion, vote breakdown and outcome on one page, so an ops lead can point a new member at one link instead of a Slack thread.
• Subgroups carry independent privacy settings, so an agency can give each client its own private space inside one instance.
• Generates meeting notes automatically, tying action items back to the thread that produced them.
• Inline translation across 30-plus languages, useful for distributed or international boards.
• Public and private groups coexist in the same instance: announcements stay open, budget votes stay members-only.