Decision making to align and make decisions together without endless meetings

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Loomio can be used as the backbone for structured, transparent decision‑making around community‑owned infrastructure, while a clear taxonomy of issues and groups prevents silos and keeps conversations horizontally connected across the transition team and the city. [1][2][3][4][5]

Core Loomio building blocks

Loomio organizes participation into groups, subgroups, discussions, and decisions (proposals/polls), which are well‑suited to multi‑stakeholder governance and consensus‑seeking processes. [1][6][7]
It supports asynchronous discussion, rich‑text context, tags/categories, and multiple voting methods (e.g., thumbs, score, ranked choice, dot voting) so that different types of decisions (vision, priorities, technical trade‑offs) can each get an appropriate process. [1][8][2][9]

Practical steps for a Mamdani transition team

Create a top‑level Loomio “NYC Community Infrastructure Council” group with subgroups for: city‑wide strategy, borough‑level planning, and issue‑specific domains like broadband, energy, climate resilience, and public space. [1][3][10]
In each subgroup, standardize workflows: post context threads (brief memos, data links), then open time‑bound proposals for decisions (e.g., “Adopt community‑owned fiber pilot in X district”), requiring written rationales and public decision records to build institutional memory. [8][2][7]
Invite cross‑cutting participants (e.g., community network co‑ops, labor, immigrant‑justice orgs, disability advocates) to the relevant subgroups instead of one isolated advisory body, and ensure notifications and access are tuned so they can participate in their own time. [1][2][3]

Taxonomy for issues and threads

Use a shared tag set across the entire Loomio instance to classify discussions along multiple dimensions, for example:
- Domain: broadband, district-energy, transport, public-banking. [3]
- Function: governance-structure, funding-models, legal-regulatory, community-organizing, operations-maintenance, data-privacy. [3][11]
- Geography: citywide, bronx, queens, brooklyn, manhattan, staten-island, plus specific neighborhoods where pilots run. [3][10]
- Equity focus: immigrant-justice, racial-equity, disability-access, youth, small-business. [3][10][10]
Require every new Loomio thread and proposal to use at least one tag from each dimension (domain, function, geography, equity) so that later you can pull “all broadband + immigrant‑justice + Queens items” into a single view, instead of letting them fragment into organizational silos. [1][2][7]

Patterns to avoid information silos

Make some groups public‑readable (or at least cross‑department readable) whenever confidentiality is not essential, and rely on Loomio’s clear decision records to show who decided what, when, and why. [1][2][6]
Encourage “bridging” practices: rotate members across subgroups, host periodic cross‑group synthesis threads that ask “what did broadband learn this month that matters for energy and housing?”, and tag such synthesis posts with all relevant domains. [12][2][4]
Use Loomio’s decision summaries as inputs to offline assemblies and participatory budgeting processes, and then bring the outputs of those in‑person spaces back into Loomio threads, maintaining a continuous feedback loop between street‑level organizing and city‑hall decision‑making. [8][2][13]

Applying this to community‑owned networks and participatory democracy

For community broadband or other community‑owned infrastructure, define governance questions in Loomio discussions: ownership model (municipal, cooperative, hybrid), board composition, accountability mechanisms, data policies, pricing principles, and reinvestment priorities, drawing on established community broadband governance concepts. [3][13]
The Mamdani administration can use Loomio to pilot “participatory governance tracks” where affected residents co‑decide on site selection, service standards, and reinvestment plans, demonstrating that governing—like the campaign—is something done with people, not to them. [14][4][5]

Children: Teams can slice work by “what/where/who/how” instead of department silos

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