Now Legislators can Phone Home to Thousands of Constituents. Tele-Town Hall is poised to shape the future of political exchange.

Rodney Smith may one day be regarded as the man who changed the very nature of the relationship between constituents and their elected representatives. Thanks to a happy conflux of technologies, the entrepreneur and founder of Tele-Town Hall Inc. is at long last realizing a vision years in the making.

A decade ago, Smith had the notion of trying to create a format in which an individual — an executive, elected official or some other VIP — could communicate with a large group of people. The telecommunications technology available in the early 1990s, however, was limited in that the more participants a VIP tried to include, the more likely the phone system would be overloaded.

It wasn’t until the emergence of voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) that Smith could reliably connect multitudes of people for a conversation with a specific individual. What began as a little more than a nifty idea has evolved into Tele-Town Hall. Already in use by one California congressman — with numerous other legislators taking notice — Tele-Town Hall is poised to shape the future of political exchange.

By Chad Vander Veen

Full Story: http://www.govtech.net/magazine/story.php?id=98597