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

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 didn't 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 everyone's 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."

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, you're a bunch of web developers. Can you make us a tool for making non-heirarchical 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. It's uses at non-profits and small businesses like San Francisco's 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. What's more, it's 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.

The Loomio interface is simple. At the top of the screen, you'll 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.

The voting system is inspired by the hand signals used by Occupy activists during General Assembly. You can vote yes, no, block, or abstain. When you vote, you can write a Twitter-length summary of why you voted the way you did. And after participating in the discussion, you can change your vote — as long as you change it before the set deadline for the proposal.

None too surprisingly, the arrangement has caught on with protesters, such as those participating in the mass demonstrations in Brazil and Turkey last year, or those in Taiwan this year. Knight says volunteer contributors have translated the application into 20 different languages. But it's not just activists using Loomio. Urban Adventures, for example, is a tourism company with eight employees and 90 local partners scattered across the world.

At the company, getting everyone in a room to discuss a new idea would be impossible. Before adopting Loomio, the company consulted its employees far less in its decision making process, the company's general manager Tony Carne tell us by e-mail. Now the company uses Loomio to involve all the employees, plus a quorum of 12 of its most successful partners to make decisions. Last year the company even used the tool to make one of its biggest decisions yet.

"For the first three years we had a very rigid product structure," Carne says. "All our tours needed to conform to the structure of guaranteed departures, no minimum numbers, minimum five day a week schedule." Using Loomio, the company decided to expand its offers to include private tours and one-off tours that coincide with local events.

Meanwhile, The Wise Group, one of the largest non-government provider of mental health services in New Zealand, has been testing the software. A survey found that the team testing Loomio felt far more involved in the organization's decision making process than other teams, Wise Group chief executive Jacqui Graham said in a video interview on the Loomio site. The organization is now rolling the product out to more teams.

One possible problem is that there's no way to vote anonymously. That could be an issue if someone wants to vote against something that's otherwise very popular within a group. But Knight says the Loomio team has been influenced by feminist activist Jo Freeman's essay "The Tyranny of Structurelessness," which outlined the ways that social pressures can silently influence group behavior, and that the team is working on ways to make invisible power structures more transparent.

There's also the question of how people without reliable internet access can participate. "Not being mobile is a big barrier right now," Knight says. "We're helping groups in countries where desktops and laptops aren't as common, so we have a long-term vision for building an SMS interface for places where mobile internet isn't even common."

Those challenges could become more important as the software spreads to other uses. Unlike applicators like Democracy OS or Liquid Feedback, Loomio isn't really designed for large scale political decision making. But it's already been used for at least one government initiative. Last year, the Wellington City Council used Loomio to gather ideas and feedback from the public for new alcohol policies. The ideas floated included closing bars at midnight — which was shot down — and limiting the hours of operation of 24 hour liquor stores.

This was exactly the sort of situation where making sure all stakeholders were comfortable speaking their minds is important. But at least the decisions made in Loomio weren't binding. The City Council still needed to discuss and each issue themselves. But if Loomio were ever to be retooled to support this type of large scale decision making, it would need to do security audits, and find ways to address participation issues.

But for now, Knight says the team plans to stick to humbler goals: helping small groups make decisions together.

Correction 4:45 EST 04/28/14: An earlier version of this story quoted Benjamin Knight saying "It's been a really good medium for getting people to all say no to something all at once. But it's been difficult to get people to agree on a course of action" in reference to Loomio. Knight says he was referring to the internet in general, not to Loomio in particular. We've removed the quote to clarify Knight's intent. We regret the error.