Regarding Loomio, this was the message I was referring to (at the gathering)
I have some experience with Loomio (mixed feelings, but they are evolving in a good direction). This type of application would be ideal for implementation as a federated app, as hamishcampbell refers to. PS. I have personal long-term plans that are related to that.
My preference would be to keep things on this Discourse forum, which offers enough features to be equivalent if not better to Loomio. And it would save yet another tool where we need to spread our attention to.
I suppose that now that we have Discourse + Loomio, shifting to use one of them might actually be more effort for us now 
EDIT 21/05/2021: the discussion about Loomio has been moved over here and is ongoing