There's been talk in the hbar of starting an "Ask me Anything" (AMA) series in which featured guests would answer questions from other users. These questions would be about physics, the guest's career, or anything else.
What format would work well for a Physics Stack Exchange AMA?
We could just open the chat room for any and all questions from users and answers from the guest. How would the guest keep track of the questions? How would participants keep track of the answers if they’re interrupted by messages from other people?
In this style, users submit questions ahead of time, e.g. here in the meta. A moderator (not necessarily a site moderator) filters the questions, e.g. by meta votes, and then conducts a real-time interview with the guest, in the chat room, based on those questions. Some allowance for on-the-spot questions during the interview would be good. We could open a side chat room for these questions.
This is similar to DanielSank's idea.
First a meta question is made, asking what questions should be asked to the subject of the AMA. People post their questions as answers to this meta post. Then, there is a period of time where people upvote the questions they want to see answered. Maybe these get community wiki'd to not mess up rep too much. After this voting period ends, the subject of the AMA edits his initial answer into each of the questions (where each question, remember, is an "answer" to a meta post).
After the subject of the ama makes his initial answer to a given question, discussion can continue in the form of comments, which will get moved to chat. Thus each quetion has its own chat room where a free form discussion can take place. After discussion of one question dies down, the subject of the AMA moves on to the next question.
A downside is that a moderator will need to continually edit the original meta post to indicate which question's chat room the subject of the AMA is currently in. The advantage is that the questions are more easily browsable.
Reddit is a forum style website. Users post comments to the original post, or as child comments of existing comments. In this way, a reddit thread is a tree of comments. In Reddit AMA's, the main post introduces the guest and the top level comments (those which are children of the main post) ask questions. The guest answers the question in a comment which is a child of the question comment. Other users can post follow-up questions as child comments of the answer, etc.
This style probably cannot work in a chat room, but it could work as a meta post. Questions could be submitted as comments on the main post, and the guest could write answers as answers.
