I’ve been listening to tons of the Long Now presentations. They really great and dense presentations about thinking about things in terms of a long view over hundreds or millions of years.
One thing I really love is how they let the audience ask questions. The audience writes their questions down and hands them to the moderator to read. This seems to create a better conversation with the speaker and makes for more intelligent questions.
Too often in other talks, Google’s talks are a good example, people ask their questions aloud. Most people are not well spoken though and a great question in their head does not always come out as a great question.
Making people write the question down makes the think out their question and really seems to bring some great question to the surface.