Maybe a fork of some wiki application can act as a digital townhall library? They usually publish meeting notes on their websites, so why not on a wiki platform, many of them have discussion pages and you could add open sections for public suggestions and it could act as an archive or library for town information. It's just the matter of taking it seriously and giving it an appropriate budget like they do with any other public structure or organization. But if it proves to be valuable component of public organization it would be budgeted and administered appropriately.

> can't the city host it's own website with forums and everything

Of course it could... but with tight public budgets it would likely be implemented so poorly as to be useless.

That's why I suggested a group of technologically savvy people undertake the challenge to devise a system that is trivial to implement. Cost likely isn't going to be much considering a small town isn't going to need much bandwidth and since many do already run websites (albeit shabby).

My city can barely make a webpage (poor content structure), and event calendar that isn’t woefully out of date.

What about the US Digital Services? A WPA program for 21st century?

Well then as a rebuttal:

>> I'm sure a discussion somewhere like HN could quickly improve on this idea in a way that would be robust and easy to implement (because a key thing is that we want to get small towns to be able to implement this)