Loomio has already come up a few times on this show. It’s an open-source civic platform designed to help people make decisions collaboratively, and it’s been used by everyone from Pirate Parties to City Councils.

In this episode I met up with with Loomio’s Rich Bartlett to discuss the relationship of software to social change — how platforms like Facebook and Slack embed coded ideas about how people should relate to and interact with each other, and how Loomio is trying to design for new modes of interaction and consensus springing up in and around the social movements.

We discuss how a truly decentralised , horizontally organized society might look and talk through Loomio’s attempts to build the software to power it. Finally, we talk about how to upgrade what Rich calls our ‘cultural operating system’. Where does change really start: with our social organization, with our software or with ourselves?

