loomio

Agree completely. I understand the deeper issues and concepts being discussed - because I'm the kind of person that happily takes time out of my weekend to re-read Stallman essays from 2007. However, as a SaaS startup trying to communicate with non-geek end users about our AGPL-licensed FLOSS product, we have found the misunderstandings caused by the term "free" insurmountable.

Our choices are to use "open source", which more or less gets it across to lay people completely unaware of the subtleties, use "free software" and then launch into some long-form explanation of why we also charge money (of course anyone can grab the code for free and run their own instance but most of our customers don't care about any of that), or say FLOSS or Libre and it's totally unintelligible to most people and they stop paying attention before we've gotten anywhere.

Unfortunately I don't think this problem will be constructively progressed until it evolves past the realm of geeks arguing about it amongst themselves, and actually is approached as a marketing issue. Perhaps the reason the debate is still festering is there hasn't been much alignment of incentives between the marketers and the geeks to work together on it, because most software companies don't try to mutually hold the values of Free Software and commercial profit. But we won't see Free Software and its underpinning values go mainstream until that happens, and I think it would be good for everyone if it did.

Did you even read the article? The author self-identifies as a feminist. Your implication that this is about feminism vs not-feminism is simplistic and missing the point.

We got rejected for www.loomio.org - oh well.

> To be competitive, we need to build diverse organizations where people have different strengths.

Exactly. And if your hiring process locks out someone who does not have a certain strength (such as negotiation), which is not directly relevant to their job (such as programming), you will miss out on people who could have great skills in the area that is relevant to what you're hiring for. This is unfair to potentially strong candidates, and bad for your company.

People are very willing to admit that most interviewing processes simply select for people who are good at interviewing, and tests select for people who are good at test taking - these methods sometimes overlap with what you're actually trying to measure, but are obviously flawed in many ways. The same goes for negotiating, which may have a tangential correlation with being an effective programmer in some contexts, but certainly not very directly.

Ellen Pao is trying to send a signal to people who are good at what they do, but put off or intimidated by playing hardball over salaries. If you like negotiating, you're not the intended audience.

There's plenty of discussion on Hacker News about people management, culture-building, social issues, work-life balance, personal development, etc. Usually as it relates to tech and startups, but that's to be expected.

Something is going on in Spain. You can track the Indignados movement through Occupy and now Podemos. We're seeing a parallel movement in technology there to what's going on in politics with the Podemos movement [0] - decentralised, grassroots, bottom-up. It's deeply exciting to track these digital and cultural trends together and imagine a new paradigm emerging in society.

We make an open source tool for distributed collaboration, and our userbase is now overwhelmingly in Spain. This emerged organically. It seems to be very fertile ground right now for distributed communication and democracy. I would advise anyone making software in this space to get a Spanish version out there and join the wave. I wonder about how it will spread to the rest of the Spanish-speaking world and join up with related tools and movements coming out of South America, like DemocracyOS.

[0] http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/spain-politics-via-re...

This American Life did a fantastic piece on acetaminophen, how easy it is to overdose on it, and the story behind why it's still thought of as so safe. Interesting listening on this topic!

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/505/u...

I am excited about it because when I play the whole world map, it seems like every single point is in the Australian outback! This adds more variety.

> Maybe worst for me personally was most all straight forwardly representational work was labeled "illustrative" and discounted as "commercial."

While I find the "deskilling" of arts to be troubling, and experienced frustration at the lack of technical education as a fine arts student, this line made me realise that what might be deep underneath this is a rejection by those in search of "authentic" art in the face of rampant commodification by advertisers.

In a world where the true human value of art is judged by the proxy of commercial value, and many of the greatest talents are using their abilities not to further human culture but to sell products, it's not irrational for people to seek art that cannot be commodified. It's a collective search for authenticity that's unfortunately flailing and grasping at straws instead, of unpacking the deeper causes caught up with larger social and economic currents.

Yes! I wish I understood how to approach it as a hybrid social enterprise.

Not at the moment, but it's something we're working toward! We will have an API later this year, and embeddable Loomio decisions is on our roadmap.[0]

Of course as an open source project, if you had a strong use case you are more than welcome to jump in and build what you need it to do! [1]

[0] http://www.loomio.org/roadmap [1] http://github.com/loomio/loomio

Yes! I would love to get in touch and talk more. I will contact you directly. Best of luck with pol.is! The world really needs better ways to make decisions and we're going to need all kinds of complementary tools.

Really nice! I really appreciate the focus on good design and clear presentation of data. Something seeming this "simple" is not actually simple! Well done. I spend most of my life considering online tools for consensus building, and this is one of the more innovative and well executed I have seen.

I would love to see modules for this kind of non-binary polling in our open source decision-making tool[0]. I have never been a fan of straight polling because it misses some critical aspects of the discussion by pre-supposing the options, and most issues are not best approached with a conflict-based method of "A vs B, one wins". In fact the real answer is often a synthesis or evolution beyond where anyone started. Many of our users have requested polls to do temperature checks or decide quickly between options, but I have resisted because I don't want to flatten discussions into only a limited set of options that might leave out important aspects. I much prefer your approach!

[0] http://www.loomio.org

$12.99 to rent a digital movie? As we say here in New Zealand, "Yeah, nah." Considering most people here also have capped data, we'd essentially be paying twice.