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

A useful Loomio taxonomy for a city transition team should standardize how every thread and decision is tagged across topics, scales, and decision types, so teams can slice work by “what/where/who/how” instead of department silos. [1][2][3][4]

1. Core Loomio structures to use

• Base everything in a small number of top‑level groups (e.g., “Transition Team – Citywide”) with subgroups for domains (climate, housing, digital, mobility) so the taxonomy is consistent but not overwhelming. [1][2][4]
• Within each subgroup, use Loomio threads for issues and proposals/polls for concrete decisions, and make category tags mandatory on both threads and polls to keep the taxonomy applied everywhere. [3][5][6]

2. Taxonomy dimensions (tags)

Design a tag set where each item uses at least one tag from each dimension:

• Policy domain
  • Examples: housing, climate, mobility, public-space, digital-infrastructure, public-health, economic-democracy. [7][8]
• Geography
  • Examples: citywide, borough-manhattan, borough-queens, plus neighborhood tags like astoria, harlem for hyperlocal pilots. [9][10]
• Governance function
  • Examples: strategy, policy-design, implementation-plan, budgeting, legal-regulatory, operations, partnerships, community-engagement. [11][4]
• Decision type
  • Examples: advice-process, consent-decision, consensus-seeking, multi-option-prioritization, linked to the Loomio poll templates you use. [5][12][13]
• Stakeholder focus
  • Examples: youth, immigrants, tenants, small-business, disability-access, workers, CBOs. [10][9]

3. Tagging rules and governance

• Restrict tag creation to admins and document the taxonomy in a pinned orientation thread so new tags don’t proliferate ad‑hoc; Loomio supports admin‑managed category tags that apply across subgroups. [3][14][4]
• Require at least one tag from each main dimension when starting or editing a thread or poll, and empower any member to add missing tags (while limiting creation of new tag names). [3][11]
• Periodically review tag usage (e.g., quarterly “taxonomy cleanup”) to merge synonyms, retire unused tags, and adjust the vocabulary as the transition work evolves. [3][4]

4. Preventing silos with cross‑cutting views

• Encourage people to browse and filter by tags (“show everything tagged digital-infrastructure + community-engagement across the whole transition workspace”) instead of only working inside their subgroup lists. [3][14]
• Create regular “synthesis” threads that pull in links to tagged discussions from multiple subgroups (for example, a monthly cross‑domain summary for all neighborhood-pilots), and ensure those synthesis threads themselves carry cross‑domain tags. [1][8][15]
• Use consistent decision templates (e.g., one advice‑process template for cross‑department decisions) so people recognize patterns and can quickly understand decisions even when they come from other domains. [5][12][16]

5. Onboarding and practice for transition teams

• Include Loomio orientation in transition‑team onboarding: a short walkthrough of groups, threads, decision templates, and the tag taxonomy, plus a “sandbox” group to practice posting/tagging. [14][4]
• For each major workstream, define what “must be decided in Loomio” (e.g., draft policies, pilot criteria, budget trade‑offs) so important decisions are recorded with tags and can be revisited later as institutional memory. [1][6][11]

Sources [1] Loomio – make decisions together https://www.loomio.com [2] Loomio – Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loomio [3] Category tags – Loomio Help https://help.loomio.com/en/user_manual/groups/tags/index.html [4] Good Governance Guide to Loomio https://help.loomio.com/en/guides/board_processes/index.html [5] Proposals and polls – Loomio Help https://help.loomio.com/en/user_manual/polls/intro_to_decisions/index.html [6] Making decisions – Loomio Help https://help.loomio.com/en/user_manual/getting_started/decisions/index.html [7] Loomio Blog https://www.loomio.com/blog/5/ [8] Ecosystems for cities . . tooling-up smart citizens – Loomio https://www.loomio.com/d/utVYf1Ga/ecosystems-for-cities-tooling-up-smart-citizens [9] How to build a successful team… to make your city’s transition happen https://energy-cities.eu/how-to-build-a-successful-team-to-make-your-citys-transition-happen/ [10] [PDF] Transition Team Playbook – NetZeroCities Portal https://netzerocities.app/assets/files/Transition_Playbookv0.1.pdf [11] Record keeping – Loomio Help https://help.loomio.com/en/guides/board_processes/admin.html [12] Poll templates – Loomio Help https://help.loomio.com/en/user_manual/polls/poll_templates/index.html [13] Simple decision process – Loomio Help https://help.loomio.com/en/user_manual/polls/decisions/index.html [14] Orientation tour – Loomio Help https://help.loomio.com/en/user_manual/getting_started/orientation.html [15] Loomio Blog https://www.loomio.com/blog/ [16] Transforming governance in collaborative organizations – Loomio https://www.loomio.com/boards-and-governance/ [17] Using Loomio for multi-options decisions https://www.loomio.com/d/dSa6b1qe/using-loomio-for-multi-options-decisions [18] Political use for Loomio https://www.loomio.com/d/lGSO7guf/political-use-for-loomio [19] Loomio: The Occupy Inspired App for Consensus Decision Making https://www.shareable.net/loomio-the-occupy-inspired-app-for-consensus-decision-making/ [20] Tags and types: Tips for setting up a taxonomy – YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59r4zGTBLME