The Loomio Co-op Handbook
An update for 2022
This handbook was written circa 2016. We preseve it here because it's a useful history of the organization at the time.
In 2022, 10 years since Loomio launched, the team is smaller, but also more experienced. We're currently just 4 people in operational roles and 4 in advisory roles. We're still a worker-owned cooperative, and we're just as passionate about our work today as we were when this book was written - we've just changed how we work to suit our smaller team. We're proud of this handbook as it is, and hope you find something useful within.
If you're interested in using Loomio, you're welcome to try a demo or start a trial at loomio.com.
If you've been following us for a long time, you might like to catch up with the current activities of the authors: Alanna Irving and Richard Bartlett.
The software we build is open source, and our organisation is open source too. This handbook is where we document how we run an efficient organisation without a hierarchy.
We build software for collaborative decision making, used by thousands of organisations and communities around the world. If you’re looking for a way to make group decisions without meeting, try it out at loomio.com.
VIDEO: Loomio co-founder Alanna introducing the co-op handbook, and talking about why we open source our organisational development.
If you're viewing this on a small screen, you'll find a table of contents by clicking the menu icon at the top left.
Other stories about developing an open organisation
Besides this handbook, Alanna and Rich have written a bunch of stories based on their experience as two of the Loomio co-founders. Here's a couple:
- Beyond “Dreamers vs Doers” — Full Circle Leadership
- How to Grow Distributed Leadership
- Bootstrapping a Bossless Organisation in 3 Easy Steps ;-)
- A Caring Organisation: Feelings, Magic & Gendered work
Feel free to contact @richdecibels on Twitter if you want to chat about this stuff 💅
About this handbook
If you find this handbook helpful in your work, please let us know. We'd love to hear from you. 🐌
The handbook was discussed on Hacker News. The comment thread is a good source of further FAQ style information.
You can find the code on Github.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 Unported License.