1. Loomio is great and we hope we'll have resources to host it. Initially we've decided to go with discourse (forum) because of its mailing list features.
2. We are working on automating the deployment, configuration and updates of all services using ansible, bash, lxc. We hope to release our playbooks as soon as they are usable and tested. Goal is to have a main script to provision a server.
For now we encourage ppl to use https://yunohost.org/