Good day,
This platform seems like it could potentially work well for a small town community for public outreach communications, and I can pitch this idea to my own home town government at public council meetings.
The main person who would probably be the one to be in charge of launching and managing this would be the director of community planning, who sometimes attends these meetings along with the city clerk and mayor. My town government is fairly small as there are only about a thousand permanent residents of the town, while the primary economy is tourism with events often doubling or tripling the population temporarily on holiday weekends.
The main benefit of a discourse site I believe would be for improving communications between the permanent resident community, but having a public message board site that visitors can see and participate in could also be helpful. If the town government does want to try launching a discourse site for this I believe a hosted by discourse site would probably be the best option so they can have team tech support for the platform. I can offer to launch a self-hosted lower cost server option for them but can’t do any custom theme development am not a coder.
I am starting this public topic speaking generally here in case anyone else has tried a similar kind of discourse site with a small town government and can speak about how that went and any ideas about how this may or may not work well.