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It is always a good thing to attend conferences about the launch of new products, presentations about some new technology ready to make an appearance all the way to some prominent figure addressing something important. However the entire thing blows off in the Q&A session when almost every hurls all sorts of questions and almost all of them don’t get answered. Time is key and it’s important that one way or the other the number of questions be scaled down in relevance to the topic.

Well an element of making the noise quite down a bit has been introduced by Google’s App Engine and its called the Google Moderator. The purpose of it is to scale down the questions in a way that only the most relevant of them are asked.

It simply requires users to place their question and let other participants vote for it, whether the question should be asked or not. With this only the most popular question gets a chance to surface allowing the presentation to be directed more effectively as it would know what majority of the participants have in mind. As Taliver Heath speaks in his blog post:

I designed a tool in my 20% time that would allow anyone attending a tech talk to submit a question, and then give other participants a way to vote on whether or not that question should be asked. This way, the most popular and relevant questions would rise to the top so that the presenter or the moderator of an event could run the discussion more efficiently and in a transparent manner.

Named Dory (a fish in Finding Nemo) the tool is pretty handy and definitely has what it takes to shape the presentation in the right way by keeping in view what most of the participants might have questions for. The tool, like everything Google is available for all to use here.