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Re: Questions after talks at DebConf (idea)



Norbert Preining <norbert@preining.info> writes:

> On Mon, 10 Sep 2018, Gunnar Wolf wrote:
>> > My suggestion is as follows:
>> > * anyone can send questions for that specific talk (anonymously or
>> > not) by accessing an url
>> > * other people can upvote/downvote the question as the talk is going
>> > * the speaker has an online dashboard where they can see the most
>> > upvoted questions and answer the ones they would like to (if the
>> > speaker agreed to answer questions after the talk)[1]
>> 
>> I really disliked the voting part of this tool, though. I don't want
>> people to refrain from asking something because they think they will
>> be downvoted.
>
> I agree with that. The above proposal sounds like the perfect way to
> shut down questions at all.

Did you actually see the talk[1]?

  https://debconf18.debconf.org/talks/135-q-a-session-with-minister-tang/

People queuing at a microphone would have been a very poor substitute
IMO.

Perhaps it was more about Minister Tang's style, and the fact that she
answered the first question very soon after the start of the talk which
will have encouraged more to sign onto the site, but it really seemed to
work for that talk.

There were clearly more than enough questions.

Then again, it was a good talk by an experienced speaker, so perhaps for
other speakers it would be a horrible distraction to be looking for
questions somehow.

Having the option of both approaches seems like an improvement.

The main down-side I can think of is that one needs some tech to ask a
question, rather than just grabbing a mike.

On the other hand, it greatly improves the ability of people watching
the stream remotely to get involved in the talk.

One might complain that it allows the speaker to ignore questions they
don't like, but the times when Q&A seems to really go badly are when the
questioner is either incomprehensible and won't shut up, or is
antagonistic and is asking the question mostly to indulge in some
(tedious and irrelevant) rant, both of which would be neatly filtered
out by this approach (both by not getting upvotes, but also because the
speaker can just quietly ignore questions if they prefer).

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
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