Programming

I’d like to have open forums for public discussion and feedback, but restrictive voting for board members. […] but I don’t want to worry about all the moderator tools and restrictions and BS either.

These are not compatible. If you're providing a place for collaboration and for users to post their own expression, you are responsible for moderation of that expression, like it or not.

Any place where different people come together will be a site not only of on-topic genial collaboration; it will be also a site of content that is off-topic, or time-wasting, or community-harming, or ignorantly harmful to some members, or deliberately malicious, etc. And there will be disagreements about the definitions of all these, and you'll need to come up with policy that resolves those.

You'll either begin with tools (technical and policy decisions) to deal with this before turning it on; or you will be obliged to deal with these issues with no tools to help, while the system is live and the disagreements are festering in real time. Hopefully you'll prefer the former.

In a nutshell, there will not exist any premade, out-of-the-box collaboration platform that works precisely for your use-case. And indeed, for anyone's use-case, because there are so many variables at play. Do you have:

• to deal with scale of 10-100 people or 100k to 10M?
• trolls and malicious actors that want to derail your project by bikeshedding?
• a user base that might not already be skilled at recognizing toxic team members?
• a legal entity for this project which is required to keep minutes or any other reporting requirements?
• paid developers around the world, which only use this platform to talk to you, thus it must be secure to store PII?
• and so on

The reason people think it's easy to choose a collaboration tool is because they see Teams and Slack and think that they can just buy a product (or a FOSS equivalent) and they can hit the ground running. But anyone who has set up a Slack community knows that there are a lot of rules and conventions that have to be established. For example, FTX (the failed cryptocurrency exchange) was using Slack emojis to approve business expenses. Setting aside that example of colossally bad financial controls, every org of any size must establish what their baseline processes are, and that extends to the collaboration platform.

but I don't want to worry about all the moderator tools and restrictions and BS either.

Moderation is not optional. Every non-trivially sized collection of people will end up with disagreements that distract from their joint reason for being there. To not moderate is a choice, as demonstrated most succinctly by this post: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/

At the very least, the collab platform you choose to use should have some tooling for a future moderator to utilize, so that you don't have to switch platforms the moment someone reveals themselves to be a neo-nazi, starts spamming swastikas into the chat, and you're powerless to do anything about it. For small groups, it's less probable but the risk grows over time.

A combination of Nextcloud (with Forms) and Matrix. You can create users in Nextcloud and, with OIDC, avoid needing people to register separately in the chat system. You can group users into a board and share a Forms document with them, so they can do a ranking vote, and the UI will show you a Borda count.