A couple of weeks ago the house on South Boulevard got a call from a slightly larger house on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Our interactive team was being called to serve- to create a site ASAP that could be used as a vehicle for the leaders of our country to hear the thoughts and concerns of military service members.

In about a day our team put together an initial shell and had the site up and functioning. What you might think of as a quick and dirty project under a needed-to-be-done-yesterday deadline turned out to be cool and quick, but elegantly and neatly executed.

The site is built on the WordPress platform and enhanced with custom PHP. It’s hosted in the cloud- it doesn’t sit on any physical server but lives virtually across the Rackspace Cloud, pushing the limits of what they’ve ever done with cloud hosting in the past.

A couple weeks and several revisions after the initial phone call, we were talking to the White House New Media team to make final adjustments.

Now up and running and ready to listen, Military OneSource’s Troop Town Hall site provides a direct line of communication between service members, the President and Secretary of Defense. Those who serve our country will be able to pose questions or vote on others’ questions for the month of September. At the end of the voting period, President Obama and Secretary Gates will answer the questions that receive the most votes.

The voting for this round ends September 25, but the Town Hall’s direct line of communication will remain open and online for future conversations.