Google’s famed 20 percent program bore yet another offspring on Thursday: a new application that democratizes the question-asking process in meetings. Google Moderator allows participants in a large-scale, real-life meeting to evaluate each others’ questions to make sure the most important ones get asked.
Google engineer Taliver Heath dreamed up the application as a solution to Google’s increasingly crowded “tech talks” where speakers discuss technical issues. Rather than having participants randomly pitching out questions and wasting a presenter’s time with duds, Heath envisioned a tool that would push the best questions to the front of the room. The tool came to be known internally as Dory, after the inquisitive fish from Finding Nemo, then went public on Thursday as Google Moderator.
