For the DD4D conference, which took place in Paris in June 2009, we designed and developed this new system for collecting questions and remarks. Big conferences like those held by the OECD are always on a very tight schedule. Anyway, it is vital to those meetings to hold Q&A sessions after every talk, so that issues can be discussed actively.

Q & Awesome facilitates and improves this process in a variety of ways. Listeners can post their question during the talk on a specially designed web application. A moderator reviews the questions in real time in order to eliminate duplicates and forward the most relevant ones to the speaker at the end of the session. This saves a vast amount of time that is usually spent on passing around microphones or selecting questions. In addition, it improves the overall quality and diversity of the questions asked.

The system is especially useful if a conference is streamed live over the internet. In that case, even remote users can easily get in touch with the speaker – something that was simply impossible before.

The online application is enhanced with a live projection that informs the participants of the conference about how many questions have already been collected as well as the conference schedule.