Plenty of social media products allow users to ask questions of a community and rate the best answers in an effort to identify helpful know-it-alls. But what if you need help to figure out what questions to ask in the first place? Google's new Moderator project is a tool designed for this task. We spoke with Taliver Heath, one of Google's engineers (and Ars Centurian "LordFrith"), about what inspired Moderator, as well as where the project may be headed.

Moderator is another one of Google's infamous "20 percent" projects, produced on the 20 percent of Heath's time that Google allots all of its engineers to work on their own ideas. The simple idea behind Moderator is to offer a public forum in which users can submit questions that they believe should be asked during a specific meeting or event. Other users can then vote on whether they like each question and agree on which should be asked, thereby using the power of crowdsourcing to decide what the most important issues are for the audience. Ideally, a journalist or someone moderating a tech talk or meeting could present these questions, thereby making the most out of what is typically a short amount of time for Q&A.

Heath used an example scenario to explain his vision for Moderator: "How many city council meetings have you been to? How about school boards? There are always questions you may have about the running of your city, town, state, etc. I believe a public application like Moderator can make civil participation significantly higher in local governments."

Right now, Moderator is a fairly one-dimensional product. Any user can sign up to create a "Series," tied to an event or venue for which he or she would like to solicit questions. Multiple users can be invited to be the "owner" of a series and moderate the questions that are submitted; users who don't have or want Google accounts can submit questions anonymously if a Series owner allows it. Users then vote on questions, bringing a Digg-style social voting aspect as the questions with the best votes float to the top of the page.

Series can have sub-topics to help keep questions organized, and Series editors can post responses and answers to questions. This makes Moderator a useful tool for getting answers to users who couldn't attend, and Heath and Google are working on plans to expand Moderator's post-event value. "Eventually, we may add 'vote for the best answer' or 'mark as authoritatively answered,'" Heath explained. "But those are still in development."

In addition to being a project that's so green that it isn't even listed at Google Labs yet, Moderator's website and UI are very much works in progress. For example, there doesn't appear to be a way to view any kind of overarching list of active Series, and even a search box is missing from Moderator's home page. For now, the best way to get an idea of how early adopters are using the site is to refresh Moderator's homepage, which contains a list of featured Series. That will of course improve as the project matures.

Moderator certainly exhibits Google's signature spartan design and appears to lack a lot in the way of bells and whistles, but its basic concept and pre-beta implementation are sound. With mainstream media increasing its use of crowdsourcing tools like blogs and Twitter, Google Moderator could one day find its place among the handful of tools that John Q Public can use to get his concerns in front of the people who can help do something about them. It may take some time, but Heath and his team have quite a bit of room to maneuver. "Google was very receptive to me working on this project, as well as letting me basically recruit interns and other people to work on it as well," he said. "It's truly a testament to the innovation here."