Google has launched a free Web-based service to help organizations streamline question-and-answer sessions during large meetings. Dubbed Moderator, the tool lets group members submit questions to the meeting leaders, then vote for or against the questions they like or don’t like. The Moderator can then choose the most popular questions.
The goal for Moderator is to improve on the familiar “raise your hand” method of questions and answers in group settings, and to get the most out of the time allotted for the session.
Google engineer Taliver Heath designed the program during his “20 percent time.” A “20 percent project” is a Google philosophy that allows employees to spend one day a week working on something not in the regular job description.
An Unbiased Moderator
“At Google, we host a large number of tech talks,” Heath explained in the corporate blog. “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.”
As Heath explained it, there was never enough time for all the questions at tech talks, and it wasn’t clear that the best questions were getting asked. And since many of these talks were led by offices outside of Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., he said, it became harder for distributed audiences to participate.
Moderator was born out of this frustration. The tool allows anyone attending a tech talk to submit a question and then give other participants a way to vote on whether that question should be asked. Call it group meetings with a social-media twist.
A Popular Tool
The result is the most popular and relevant questions rise to the top, allowing the…