Voter Forums foster frequent, meaningful and public interactions between the politicians and ordinary (non-wealthy) voters.
In the US, despite the fact that it is intuitively obvious that representative democracy requires such interactions as part of a feedback cycle, they are infrequent and private. This state of affairs is shown schematically here:
Voter-politician engagement was discussed by the Founding Fathers, and ways of ensuring it were written into the Constitution. For example, the Founders required that representative live in their districts:
June 6, 1787 - Col. MASON. The people will be represented; they ought therefore to choose the representatives. The requisites in actual representation are, that the representatives should sympathize with their constituents; should think as they think, and feel as they feel; and that for these purposes they should be residents among them.
Many of the Founding Fathers, such as Adams and Gerry, were also proponents of very frequent elections as another mechanism for ensuring feedback:
June 12, 1787 - Mr. GERRY. The people of New England will never give up the point of annual elections. [...] He considered annual elections as the only defence of the people against tyranny. He was as much against a triennial house, as against an hereditary executive.
Madison's notes quoted above were private, but a public statement by him about how representation should work was published in 1788:
Federalist 56 : It is a sound and important principle that the representative ought to be acquainted with the interests and circumstances of his constituents.
In his honor, a deliberation model has been named after Madison, and it is useful for conceptualizing the role of a Voter Forum in a Representative Democracy:
A Madisonian feedback cycle is a cycle of deliberation that allows citizens to cooperativelyformulate and communicate their general interests to their Senators and Representatives, whereupon legislators debate and craft policies to advance those interests, and then persuade their constituents of the (sometimes non-obvious) connection between the two, after which the process repeats itself in a cycle of feedback.