Google Moderator Puts Social-Media Twist on Meetings (NewsFactor)
Jennifer LeClaire, newsfactor.com 10 minutes ago
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 presenter or the moderator of an event to run the discussion more efficiently and in a transparent manner. Heath has nicknamed the tool Dory, after the question-asking fish in Finding Nemo.
What Heath discovered was that Dory quickly found a place in other parts of Google's corporate group events, including the weekly all-hands company meeting, as well as for its series of talks led by political candidates or distinguished authors.
"Several of our colleagues and visitors to Google have asked if we could make it available externally for any kind of talk, presentation and/or event. Conveniently, Google App Engine launched in April and made it easy for us to do this," Heath said.
Future Possibilities
Google Moderator offers some interesting possibilities for the future, according to Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. Google could decide, for example, to integrate moderator into Google Docs for presentations.
"If you could load presentations into Moderator and manage group chats during presentations, then it becomes an interesting, free alternative to GoToMeeting or WebEx," Sterling said. "I would suspect Google would move in that direction."
Another possibility is more search results. Google could choose to archive questions and answers in an online searchable library. At least for now, there are no ads associated with the service. The tool is available on Google App Engine and is free.