Loomio is a great tool. It works great for certain types of things but I've struggled to really build an effective worker community with it multiple times. At the end of the day, voting on proposals is not a terribly effective nor scalable form of democratic governance.
This is admittedly a complex subject to boil down into HN replies. And I do not claim to have all of the answers. But here's an attempt to share some parts of the vision.
There's nothing wrong with voting as a concept.
But most organizations implement voting such that it happens fairly infrequently on somewhat complex proposals which are fully understood by few and have been heavily guided by leadership. Those proposals tend to be necessarily high-level since voting on all of the little details is impractical. As such, the overall "choice bandwidth" of these traditional voting paradigms are quite low. Also the level of thoughtfulness, engagement, and participation are often low as well (ask anyone who's been involved in an old school coop and they'll confirm this). Also these paradigms are not very agile and do not adapt well to projects which evolve and change over time.
There are lots of potential solutions, but the high level guiding principle is to design structures which are able to support and incentivize more choices being made more thoughtfully by more people more frequently.
So, governance which functions more like a (well-designed) video game and less like a city council meeting.
At Quorum1 we focus very heavily on using stigmergy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy) as a design principle. The idea is to use internal marketplace structures to (a) gamify the process of building consensus and (b) break what could be large/episodic/top-down/waterfall/boolean decision making processes into smaller more spectrum-based decisions. So instead of voting Yes/No on a big proposal and going with whatever got 51%, you run a participatory budgeting process to simultaneously fund multiple potential solutions which then evolve and cross-pollinate until consensus emerges over time.
The strategy is to encourage ongoing experimentation and continuous decision-making able to adapt and evolve as new information comes in over time.
