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Thursday, September 25, 2008

Google Released ‘Google Moderator’ To Public, Useful Q&A Tool For Tech Talks

Google Moderator Google just released a free service called Google Moderator. This tool was internally used by Google and now it is available for public use.

Google was using this tool during their tech talks or company-wide meetings. It lets anyone ask a question and then people can vote up the questions that they’d like answered. Tool was developed by Taliver Heath, Platform Engineer at Google.

The user interface looks like this:

As per Taliver “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.

To help with this, 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.”

You can create your own “series,” which lets people ask and vote on questions.

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