What is live Q&A?

Live Q&A replaces the floor microphone, which reaches about four people per session and selects for confidence rather than for the quality of the question.

In practice at an event

Attendees submit questions from their phones during the talk, other attendees upvote, and the queue sorts by votes. A moderator approves questions into the visible list and hands the speaker the top three near the end.

Upvoting is what makes this better rather than merely different. It consolidates duplicates, it lets people who would never take a microphone participate at zero cost, and it gives the speaker a genuine signal about what the room wanted — useful even for the questions there was no time to answer.

The moderator is a real job. At a multi-track conference, under-staffing Q&A moderation is one of the two most common crewing mistakes.

What to look for

Moderation before display, rather than showing everything and removing problems. A visible unfiltered queue changes what attendees are willing to ask, and it forces the moderator to remove things in public.

Anonymous submission is worth allowing. With moderation before display the risk is manageable, and the questions people will not attach a name to are frequently the ones the room most wants answered.

How event67 handles it

Attendees ask and upvote during a session, and questions reach an organizer approval queue before the room sees them. There is a dedicated Q&A moderator role in the console. Every question, answered or not, is kept in the end-of-event report — which makes the most-upvoted questions across the whole event the best programme research you will get all year.