The bet
Loomio came out of the Occupy movement in Wellington in 2011. Activists frustrated by the limits of the general assembly met technologists from the Enspiral network, who had the same complaint from the other direction. Both wanted fast, inclusive decisions without endless meetings.
The tool they built attached a threaded discussion to a concrete proposal, so a group could move deliberately toward consent, consensus or a vote, with the outcome recorded. Occupy had done horizontal, inclusive decision-making in person, and badly at scale. The bet was that it could work online, and that this would matter for democracy well beyond any single group.
Peak
Loomio never had a venture-scale peak, by design. It ran a successful international crowdfunding campaign in 2013 and shipped Loomio 1.0 in 2014. In 2015 it raised about $450,000 from values-aligned investors, using redeemable preference shares that protected the cooperative's independence.
Activist groups, unions, nonprofits and cooperatives in more than a hundred countries adopted the software, along with some government bodies experimenting with consultation. It became a respected fixture of the civic-tech and platform-cooperative worlds.
What worked
The product is humane, well made and open-source, and the organized groups that took it up kept using it. The unusual part is the structure. Because the people who build the software own it, Loomio could take outside money in 2015 without letting that money bend the mission. Almost no venture-backed peer managed that. For anyone studying how structure protects values, Loomio is a primary source.
What failed — the mechanism
Loomio's constraint is scope. Survival was never the problem.
Inclusive online deliberation works when a group already shares a reason to decide together and a duty to reach an outcome: a cooperative dividing its surplus, a union local setting a position, an activist network choosing tactics. It can't conjure participation among strangers who share no such obligation.
So Loomio's market settled into organized groups, and the larger Occupy-era hope of reshaping public democratic decision-making stayed mostly aspirational. The reach narrowed. The values didn't. Loomio chose to stay a small cooperative and not chase a scale it didn't believe was real.
What Agora takes from it
Deliberation among strangers doesn't scale the way its champions hope. Agora takes that as a caution and doesn't build on open citizen deliberation. Participation on Agora is structured and anchored to an official's actual work, and citizens are kept out of the open-broadcast role.
The second lesson is more hopeful. Loomio raised money and kept its mission because of how it was owned. Agora draws the same conclusion: decide early, and by design, how the work gets paid for, so that funding it never means trading away what it is for.
Common questions
- What was Loomio?
- A worker-owned deliberation tool born from Occupy, which kept its values by staying small and found that inclusive online decision-making lives inside organized groups, not open civic populations.
- Is Loomio still running?
- Loomio is recorded here as survived (narrowed). We file it under the pattern we call The narrowing survivor, which describes how it endured and what it gave up to do so.
- When did Loomio operate?
- 2011–present (operating as a worker cooperative).
- CountableThe bill-tracking civic app that, in Agora's reading, could not carry the company, so it took its engagement engine to brands such as Starbucks and Uber.
- FixMyStreetBritain's durable street-fault reporting map, a nonprofit success that lasted by doing the small thing a council will pay for, reporting the pothole, and leaving the larger civic one aside.
- g0vTaiwan's leaderless civic-hacker community that 'forked the government', seeded vTaiwan and Cofacts, and has lasted over a decade because it never became a company or a product, with all the fragility that model carries.