From the “free is great, but open is best” files:
If you ever wondered what type of application could be built on top of Google’s AppEngine, Google now has given us another example. Google Moderator is a new free (as in Beer) tool that acts as an online moderator for an event in that it will take question submissions and allow for polling.
“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.”
It’s a simple idea really, but as a free online hosted service at Google, it becomes a lot more than just a simple idea – it becomes (yet another) Google (Beta) service. A service that undoubtedly will have tremendous practical utility and one that could ultimately be part of broader collaboration offerings from Google.
So far as I can tell, Google has not released the source code for this (on Google Code at least – if I’m wrong please let me know). Polling kind of application aren’t too hard to script but I suspect that there is some real Google goodness in Moderator, and I for one am keen to look under the hood to see it.
