One option for hosting governance discussions that’s been brought up a few times is to spin up a Loomio instance. That seems to me to be a good approach, but I wanted to ask if folks here had any thoughts on that before pulling the trigger.
I haven’t used Loomio specifically, but I am wondering if that’s not used then what is the alternative. The proposed charter seems written with the expectation that there be a formal process of some sort, so it seems helpful to lay out what the “default” process would be otherwise
my take: loomio is really good if you actually need it. i’m not quite sure what the state of the project is at the moment, but if there’s not many people involved, loomio may end up being more overhead (both procedural and technical) than it’s worth.
over on the website league, we use loomio to facilitate consensus decision making between a group of roughly ~20 community stewards. we’ve found it to work pretty well for our needs - votes are pretty configurable, the threaded discussions are easy to navigate and review, and it serves as a good decision log. i’d say it’s good for groups larger than 10 members - anything smaller and you can get by with more ad-hoc decision making tools (chatrooms, forums, polls, etc.). once you find yourself needing to coordinate consensus between more people, and/or needing a more structured decision log (especially if you want to integrate the two things), loomio is great. if you’re not there yet - maybe wait and see.
one thing to note, though - self-hosted loomio is a bit of a pain to admin. i’d strongly recommend following their official deploy guide as closely as possible - the specific struggles we had evade me at the moment (it was setup over a year ago now), but there are many moving parts to a loomio deploy and deviating from the provided scripts tends to be very painful. you may even want a dedicated vm for it, just to keep it isolated from everything else and easier to manage. depends on your current infra setup.
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