...maybe.  Hear me out.

So you know I'm coming off of organizing 2 conferences.  And you know I think about conference Q&A. And that yesterday the founders of controversial Yik Yak came to speak at UGA.  At Monday's Yik Yak session we decided to field questions from the audience to Yik Yak founders via the app itself.  None of us were sure how it would work, and I knew that some students in attendance had good reason to be angry about Yik Yak. 

So onstage there were 2 founders, 1 student moderator asking most of the questions, and then a second student, Daniel, who would occasionally ask questions posed by the audience.  I thought Daniel might get overwhelmed, so I volunteered myself to be in the back of the audience monitoring the yaks and texting him questions. 

I had never used the app before, but I downloaded it as I was running out of the house.  And I have to say, I see the appeal, particularly at an event with a large number of people. The first Yak I read was quite amusing: "Asian guy giving out free stuff at Yik Yak meeting: you're sexy and I must have you."  Similar yaks opined that the founders were cute.  It kind of feels like you're eavesdropping on the secret lives of college students.  That's mostly funny.

Here is one screenshot I took so you can get a sense for what I'm talking about.  I'll post 2 more below the fold.

Once the conversation got going it, the questions proliferated.  It was kind of amazing: I could hear what audience members were thinking, what they wanted to ask--and, because of the voting feature, how many of them were interested in any given question.  And they could see the same thing.  A few racism questions were popular, and Daniel asked them.  But also popular were questions about the origins of the Yik Yak name--I'd read enough press accounts to know the answer, so I might have filtered that one out, but 20 people wanted to know.  And here's another one I transmitted: "Do you think because of its anonymity Yik Yak is an accurate depiction of campus life?"  That question got a few appreciative "mmm"s from the back of the room--I heard one adult observer murmur, "Good question." 

All in all, I found it to be an uniquely interactive talk.  Even though only 4 people were speaking out loud, a sizable contingent of the audience was engaged in a nondisruptive conversation about the talk as it unfolded.  And that conversation influenced how the talk unfolded.  As Q&A sessions go, it was amazing.

Contrast this with the typical talk, be it at a law conference or elsewhere.  How does the audience ask questions?  With some version of an open mike.  The benefit of an open mike is that it allows anyone to ask a question--in theory.  But people might be reluctant.  And you can get an obscurantist or a partisan bloviator that the rest of the room finds uninteresting.  Politeness dictates that anyone can have the floor, but there's no principled way to filter the questions or ensure that popular ones get asked.

Take, for example, last week's symposium.  Originally the last panel was going to have 2 Georgia state banking regulators, and we knew we would draw a lot of practitioners.  We asked IT about ways to have the audience pose questions anonymously, maybe posting them to a message board.  They couldn't figure out a way to do it. 

It turns out, we had the technology--if only we could convince the audience to download Yik Yak.  We had students, practitioners, and scholars in the audience.  They could have weighed in on the questions they wanted, or the moderator could have chosen a mix of questions to keep everyone interested. Any filtering mechanism inevitably raise hackles, but with the votes visible on Yik Yak, if the moderator tried to screen out an awkward question that a lot of people wanted asked, everyone would know.

I know, there are jerks out there.  We might not like who we are when we are anonymous.  But at UGA the downvoting seems to work, and the Yik Yak founders assert that with a big enough group, problematic Yaks don't stay up that long.  I'm not sure yaking questions would work at a non-Yik Yak Q&A session.  But it's fun to think about trying.

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