Should we have a sub-forum for less structured, forum-style discussions?
I was about to post a question to another music DSP forum about collecting free and open learning materials to a website. I wanted to post such a great idea to a non-ad-supported website, such as Codidact. However, the discussion around, for example, the feasibility of such a website does not follow the Q&A format. So if I wished to write about this idea to e.g. electrical.codidact, then I cannot do this.
Now, if music DSP is not your cup of tea, then the question could be asked about free EE learning materials too.
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Here are some ideas and relevant factors about the platform. I'm not expressing an opinion and am not voting (not being a core EE member), just offering suggestions about what is feasible.
As already noted, the Q&A category is for more focused, answerable questions. Codidact's categories are intended to separate different types of content -- for example, Papers here, Code Golf's Sandbox, and Software Development's Code Reviews. The posts in those categories are not questions in the Q&A sense, but they are "adjacent" content that their communities find helpful. If EE wanted to support this type of content, we could create another category for it.
In addition to questions and answers, the Codidact software supports articles. An article is a top-level post that does not accept answers. Papers here on EE are what you'd think of as conventional articles -- there might be comments, but the primary focus is to publish a completed work (possibly updating in response to comments). In contrast, the whole point of the sandbox on Code Golf is to share a work in progress and collect feedback. Comments are the tool used for that.
There is a proposal for a Worldbuilding community, and within that, a proposal to have a "workshop" Q&A category (separate from main Q&A). The idea is that people could ask questions that are more open-ended. It seems that within that highly-creative community in particular, this sort of space is desired. We have not tested this yet, except for the few workshop questions that have been asked so far in the incubator.
What you are asking for could be implemented as a category using either articles or questions and answers. All post types can have comments, which on Codidact are threaded one level deep. We don't have the deep nesting of (for example) Reddit, but it's not one flat list of comments like on Stack Exchange. It wasn't designed for extended discussion, but it could be used this way if you're careful about keeping threads segregated. Nobody wants to expand "general comments (78)", or look in "thread X" for the break-off discussion about topic Y that started 30 comments in.
Possibly a better approach would be to use the Wiki post type. Wiki posts are like articles but can be edited by most community members. The Descriptions category on Codidact Proposals is an example. In this model, instead of asking a question about (for example) DSP FOSS tools, you could start a page and encourage contributions. Discussions could still happen in comments, but with the goal of bringing conclusions back to the main post. Discussions in comments would be a means toward the end of a better post, rather than the main point of the activity.
The reputation effects of upvotes and downvotes can be configured per post type per category, so posts in this new category could be set to give no reputation at all, so that reputation continues to reflect expertise. This Meta category is configured that way. Wiki posts cannot be voted on and thus can't bestow reputation at all.
Some abilities depend on having positively-scored posts. The ability system can't currently restrict that by category. This is a known limitation with an issue in our tracker, but I have no idea when we might be able to do anything about that. So while we can keep that category (and Meta) from affecting reputation, we can't keep it from affecting abilities. Moderators can grant or revoke abilities, so if problems arise from this they can be addressed individually, though this isn't ideal I know.
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Back and forth discussion is not suited to the Q&A format that this web site is set up for. As far as I know, the Codidact software is not capable of a category that supports threaded discussions anyway. Discussions also tend to have low signal to noise ratio. The high density of quality content is why many users are here.
Another problem with your specific example is that things like lists of learning materials don't age well. We don't allow shopping questions here for the same reason, since component purchase recommendations age quickly.
We don't want to get into popularity contests about subjective issues, like which book is better than which other book, where there is no reasonably measurable right or wrong answer.
We do have the Papers category, which is for one-way presentation of information. However, that is limited to real facts, results of experiments, and the like. Post are intended to be somewhat scholarly, but not as rigorous as peer-reviewed papers. Our voting and comment systems essentially substitute for peer-reviews.
A carefully curated Paper could be a place where you gather references to currently available information on your topic. Since such things don't age well, it would be a good idea to prominently attach dates to the various recommendations. You can update the post periodically with new information and update the dates accordingly. If the post is eventually left to languish, at least it will be immediately obvious how old the recommendations are.
There is also Codidact chat. I know little about it, since I'm not interested in low-content kaffeeklatches. Others may be able to chime in here with more information about chat.
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