Google’s strategy of allowing its engineers to spend 20% of their work time on projects of their own interest, which once again bore the latest fruits that Google Inc. has publicly released a free Web-based service called “Google Moderator” an internal tool that applies Digg-like rankings to meetings, allowing attendees to vote on question-and-answer sessions during heavily attended meetings.
Google Moderator, earlier named “Dory” after the inquisitive fish from Finding Nemo, started out as an internal tool. Moderator allows event participants to both submit questions to meeting leaders and vote in favor or against the questions they like or dislike. In theory, meeting leaders will be able to ask speakers the questions that the group democratically chose as the best ones.
In the beginning it was proposed for the audiences at Google’s “Tech Talks” series, and then later extended to everyone attending company meetings and other lectures at the company’s Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.
The new Google Moderator tool was built-up by Google platform engineer named Taliver Heath as part of the company’s “20% time” program, where Google permits its developer’s to consume 20% of their work time to explore new technologies of their own yet relevant to the company. The free tool was released Wednesday on the company’s Google App Engine.
Heath said the idea struck to him 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, he then developed the tool for use at internal meetings, that addresses computer science topics.
“There was never enough time for all the questions, and it was unclear that the best questions were the ones actually getting asked,” Heath said. “To help with this, I designed a tool in my 20 percent 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 could run the discussion more efficiently and in a transparent manner.” Heath wrote on an official Google blog on Wednesday.
The objective 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 is also allows for distant attendees to have as much of a say as in-person participants in the process of selecting questions.
At Google, Moderator is dubbed as “Dory,” like the character in the Disney/Pixar film “Finding Nemo” whose short-term memory loss forces her to constantly ask questions.
Google has now unveiled Moderator to the general public as part of its Google App Engine platform, a service for developers to build and host their Web-based applications using Google’s computing infrastructure.