[Noisebridge-discuss] better tech for making decisions (other hackerspaces encouraged to comment!)

[Naomi Most]

I also like Slack, and I also like Loomio (I contributed to their
Kickstarter campaign).  I didn't want to bias the conversation by
proposing those things right away.

Slack has a very good API which I have used at work to write useful
bots for our lab (e.g. chat commands that report on our sequencing
runs).

Loomio I haven't tried yet, but I am going to try to set up an
instance on a server of mine, so that Noisebridge can try it out.

--Naomi

On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 1:10 PM, Tom Lowenthal <me at tomlowenthal.com> wrote:
> Naomi wrote:
>> One strong discussion topic that came up at the meeting tonight was
>> the idea of finding a better technology for discussion and
>> decision-making than the one we have now.
>
> Johny Radio wrote:
>> A members-only mailing-list.
>
> Torrie Fischer <tdfischer at hackerbots.net> wrote:
>> I've been working on this project for a while that provides a thorough API to
>> a hackerspace, including storing membership records, collecting dues, etc.
>>
>> http://spiff.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
>>
> <snip>
>>
>> There exists this web app thingee that says they're all about consensus based
>> decision making:
>>
>> https://www.loomio.org/
>
> I really like both of Torrie's ideas.
>
> [Loomio][] is a really neat tool based on Liquid Democracy, but with a
> much better front-end. It's a web app designed to facilitate
> consensus-related discussions and decisions, and to be incredibly easy
> to use. I'd love it if we could offload most of our Tuesday-evening
> decisions onto a Loomio instance. I think that'd take a lot of the
> pressure off, both in terms of time/logistics to participate, and in
> terms of feeling like we have to hurry to do things in any particular
> meeting.
>
> I also think that [Spiff][] is a fantastic step up from the tech I
> currently use to manage membership. I'd be really psyched to use it.
>
> In terms of more general-purpose tools, I *really* like [Slack][]. It
> feels a lot like IRC and even has a totally transparent IRC bridge,
> for folks who already have their own IRSSI setup. However, you don't
> need to understand IRC to use it. You can just sign into the website,
> and it has your whole backlog, including messages sent when you were
> offline. Norton Imperial Labs have been using Slack for a while, and
> we really like it.
>
> I like the idea of a members-only mailing list, apart from my dislike
> for email in general and Mailman in particular. I'd really like it if
> we stopped using Mailman, and changed to something more usable.
> Discourse is a lot like what you'd get if you tried to make mailing
> lists today. It has all the functionality of Mailman, but much better
> usability for both subscribers and moderators, as well as a lot of
> features to make forum-life much easier.
>
> -Tom
> --
>
> [Loomio]: https://www.loomio.org/
> [Spiff]: http://spiff.readthedocs.org/
> [Slack]: https://slack.com/
> [Discourse]: http://www.discourse.org/
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> Noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net
> https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/noisebridge-discuss



-- 
Naomi Theora Most
naomi at nthmost.com
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skype: nthmost

http://twitter.com/nthmost