A little while ago I posted a query on twitter:
If you haven’t seen Google Moderator, it is a fantastic system that you can use to gather and vote on questions before (or during) a meeting or class. Unfortunately, using this US-based app for an upcoming meeting will likely land me in crap, so I set out trying to find alternatives.
There are definitely a number of similarly hosted alternatives; Uservoice, GetSatisfaction, while not identical, can facilitate this sort of thing, as could Ideascale and YouSuggest. Problem is, they run afoul of the same set of alleged privacy bugaboos that means I can’t use Google Moderator (and frankly none of them are quite so sweet as it). (N.B. I say “alleged” because the irony is that the meeting I want to elicit questions for is precisely on this question of BC institutions abilities to use 3rd PArty US-based software!)
So I kept looking for Open Source or at least locally-hostable options and found the following ones too:
- Question2Answer – http://question2answer.org/
- OSQA – http://www.osqa.net/
- Stacked – http://code.google.com/p/stacked/ an Open Source clone of the Stack Overflow site)
- Idea Torrent – http://www.ideatorrent.org/
- Berkman’s Live Question Tool (which, while allegedly Open Sourced, does not appear to have source code available, too bad)
- Backchan.nl from MIT – https://launchpad.net/backchan.nl (again, promising, but where’s the code?)
None of these are perfect replacements for what Google Moderator does – the ones focused on customer feedback/software development tend to be overly busy and not clearly dedicated to the issue of crowdsourcing questions to be answered live during a meeting/class. So I will keep looking. But I thought I would share what I found in case it was helpful. If you know of a good alternative please let me know! – SWL