'Moderator' Harnesses Wisdom Of The Mob

All of us at one time or another have experienced the frustration of not being able to ask an important question at a large meeting. Google has just released a free Web-based service designed to ensure that the questions deemed most important by the group are asked.

The service is called Moderator, and as IDG News Service explains:

Moderator lets event participants 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.

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.

Perhaps even more important, in this era of telecommuting, remote users also can have a say in the selection of questions to be asked.

I haven't tried the service, but I'm curious to hear from people who have. I did go the the Moderator Beta site and found an example of how it works. In something it calls a Featured Series, Google asks users to propose and vote on questions regarding several topics. One of these is "U.S. Presidential Debates 2008." At the time I looked, 360 people had submitted 122 questions for either Barack Obama or John McCain, while casting a total of 4,079 votes.

Here's the question that had the most votes (96) in its favor:

"As President, what will you do with the "No Child Left Behind Act" of 2001? Will you seek to change it? If so, how? If not, why not?"

I know, I know. There's an economic meltdown going on in real-time, we're facing a permanent energy crisis, we're in a war, yet that's the most popular question. So much for the wisdom of the mob.