Hi everyone!
During a bike tour of New Zealand over the past three months, I visited the collectives and kept hearing about this tool called Loomio. Now I've settled in Wellington and started working with the team building the software. Loomio.org started when members of the occupy wellington movement found that some individual voices were drowning out others in general assembly meetings and started making a free online tool that would promote equity and direct democracy in decision making amongst groups. A year later and they have 3000 groups signed up from all over the world, most recently Wellington city council. The feedback we're getting is that it reduces the amount of emailing to come to decisions. I think that could be a helpful tool for bike collectives, not as a replacement to meetings, but as an additional consensus building resource for the in-between, internety times.
Here's the website: https://www.loomio.org/
Here's a demo of how the tool works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIEyNNcXbZA
Anywho, I'm obvs really jazzed to be on the loomio team, just wanted to put it out there amongst you fine folks!
Cheers, Jesse