how do you suppose the proposed Q&A will actually proceed?
at one extreme, they could let every single person who wants to say something have x seconds to speak or submit a comment / question to be read, and then respond, one by one. that could potentially take many long hours and you run the risk of folks saying anything.
at the other extreme, you could have, say, a designated 1 hour session, fill the first half with a rehash of what was said in the blog, and then have a moderator “pick” only a handful of questions that align with ones that they are already intending to answer with prepared responses. that runs the risk of not delivering any new information, although i’m sure there are folks who will appreciate an alternative presentation of even the same information and the extra effort to do that.
then there are also alternative methods made possible by technology. for example, you could break out the attendees into smaller groups, have them discuss and vote for, say, the top 3 questions from each group. then transition back to the whole group and have everyone vote in a live poll for the top 10 questions to be addressed from the collection of the top 3 questions from each group. then answer the top 10 questions, plus additional ones as time permits. that theoretically cedes more control of the questions to be answered to the crowd rather than a friendly moderator but will take more time to achieve. theoretically you could have folks vote for their favorite questions to ask in advance of the actual Q&A itself, but then something like that is a little less transparent than doing it in real time.
after user testing, how do you suppose the determination will be made of whether the effort was successful / worthwhile and should continue?
one of the predecessors to this whole thing was that Natural Language Search demo. to me, it’s interesting but not very functional as an actual product. probably some of what was learned there was used to implement the recent feature where if you click to get more information on a taxon from computer vision suggestions, it will show you a taxon photo that most closely matches your own photo.
so if the thing they’re working on now ends up not being anywhere near an actual product, do you abandon it entirely or continue with the interesting things learned? who makes that decision?