Out in the Open: Occupy Wall Street Reincarnated as Open Source Software

Image: Loomio

Benjamin Knight helped run the Occupy camp in Wellington, New Zealand.

It was 2011, when the globe was dotted with camps inspired by Occupy Wall Street, that iconic protest against economic and social inequality. As part of Occupy Wellington, Knight didnt just camp out on the street. He participated in the daily General Assembly meetings, an effort to reach a consensus on a variety of protest issues and ultimately make everyones voice heard.

He loved the process when it worked. Some discussions took hours or days without ever reaching a consensus. Worse, the ultimate decisions were sometimes made without input from the whole group. Everyone has to be together at one time and in one physical place, he says. A few voices could dominate the conversation, or a small group become dominate by waiting everyone else out.

With the right web software, he thought, it should be possible to give everyone in the group a voice.

He knew there had to be a better way. With the right web software, he thought, it should be possible to give everyone in the group a voice regardless of whether they were able to attend every single physical General Assembly or not. So he and a few other activists approached a New Zealand tech startup incubator called Enspiral. We basically turned up and asked them: Hey, youre a bunch of web developers. Can you make us a tool for making non-horizontal decisions? Knight remembers. And they said: Sure, we actually need something like this for ourselves.

The result was Loomio, an open source web application for making group decisions. It may sound like a niche application, but although the Occupy movement is largely a thing of the past, Loomio is still going strong. Its uses at non-profits and small businesses like San Franciscos Adobe Books and the Newtown Ethical Lending Trust in New Zealand. And earlier this month, the team raised over $100,000 in a crowdfunding campaign to help expand development of the platform.

There are plenty of tools for having discussions online, ranging from social networks to forums to idea management tools like Spigit or even Whitehouse.gov. But there are surprisingly few tools available for group decision making. Loomio is about participating in a process that leads to a clear course of action, not just talking for the sake of talking, Knight says. Whats more, its open source. That means you can run it on your own server without the help of anyone else, including the Loomio team and you can modify it as you see fit.

Image: Loomio

The Loomio interface is simple. At the top of the screen, youll find an explanation of the issue being discussed. The rest of the screen is then split into two columns: one side is for discussing the issue, as you would on a blog post, and the other is for voting on a specific way of addressing the issue.

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Out in the Open: Occupy Wall Street Reincarnated as Open Source Software