Google Moderator

We installed Google Moderator into our Google Apps setup this morning to try a few things out ready for September. Google Moderator is a tool for collecting the opinions of a group, their tagline is ‘helping the world find the best input from an audience of any size’. It’s something we have been talking about ever since we saw mystarbucksidea.com, knew we wanted to try something similar with our stakeholders but hadn’t got a tool to do it.

Moderator is also available for non Google Apps users, just head over to google.com/moderator to start your own. The only difference as far as I can tell at this stage is the apps version creates closed pages, our questions/suggestions are only visible to users on our domain. Sure making them public is a setting that will appear as the tool moves through the beta stages, but at the moment if you want to do this you have to do it on google.com.

How it works is really straightforward. You create yourself a question that you want to ask your users and it allows users to upload suggestions to answer it. Users can then vote on each others ideas, it tracks the most popular. You can also respond to suggestions, to let people know which ideas you are engaging with and why.

From September we’re going to try some simple small things. For example, we are currently redesigning our media server setup (Wildern TV) so will open up new feature ideas to the community. We also want to try the bigger Starbucks style projects to really start to engage with our community. Coming first will be a myWildernIdea(?!) for our community arts venue, and following that a similar setup to take contributions for staff and students. We want to start at this scale to track what kind of content is coming in, and make sure we have systems in place to effectively respond and action the ideas that come in. If this goes well we hope myWildernIdea(….) will open up to our parents and the community as a whole later in the year.

Image source- suggestion box by hashmil on Flickr