Google has released a tool (in beta of course) called Google Moderator to help you prioritize questions for Q&A sessions. It’s hosted by the Google App Engine and lets users submit questions directed toward certain people. Then others can vote on the question’s worth.
Google Platform Engineer Taliver Heath talks a little bit about how the tool came to fruition:
At Google, we host a large number of “tech talks”. These talks cover a wide rage of Computer Science topics like research in machine learning and methods for ranking images based on text queries. I’ve enjoyed attending these tech talks, but as the number of attendees has grown over time, the question-and-answer part of the talks hasn’t been able to scale. There was never enough time for all the questions, and it wasn’t clear that the best questions were the ones actually getting asked. And since many of these talks were led by offices outside of Mountain View, it became harder for distributed audiences to participate.
You can create your own series of questions with Google Moderator of course, but it also features several series that anyone can vote on (or ask questions for), such as ” Ask a World Leader “, ” Suggest an Android Application “, ” U.S. Presidential Debates 2008“, and ” Ask a Google Engineer“.
This isn’t really one of Google’s “change the world” projects, but could serve as a nice tool for those making presentations at conferences, meetings, and other events. Ultimately no matter what questions get voted on though, the presenter will likely choose which ones they want to answer.
