Google Moderator - A remedy of ad-hocism in Q/A sessions

Google has released a free Web-based service called Moderator that organizations can use to improve question-and-answer sessions during heavily attended meetings.

In theory, meeting leaders will be able to ask speakers the questions that the group democratically chose as the best ones.

The goal is to improve on the random, ad-hoc selection via the raised-hands method and thus make better use of the often limited question-and-answer periods.

Moderator also makes it possible for remote attendees to have as much of a say as in-person participants in the process of selecting questions.

The idea came to Platform Engineer Taliver Heath after attending the frequent "tech talks" Google holds and realizing that as the number of attendees has grown, many participants' questions went unasked due to time constraints, while not all questions that were asked seemed good ones.

At Google, Moderator is known as Dory, like the character in the Disney/Pixar film "Finding Nemo" whose short-term memory loss forces her to constantly ask questions. Moderator runs on Google's App Engine, a service for developers to build and host their Web-based applications using Google's computing infrastructure.