« first day (1 day earlier)      last day (35 days later) » 

Martin Sleziak
Martin Sleziak
5:03 AM
@GabeK I have to admit that this is exactly the same thing I thought about when I saw the nominations so far.
BTW congrats for getting the Talkative badge.
As a side note - there were many posts saying how reputation and badges are bad/useless, they lead to gamification.
My view is that the main purpose of reputation is to measure in some way how much experience the user has with the site - so that privileges aren't unlocked prematurely. (For example, it would not be good to let somebody vote to reopen, if the user isn't familiar with the site and does not know what is on-topic/off-topic.)
Candidate score is calculated only based on badges and reputation, but it gives you at least some rough estimate whether the user has some experience with the site and (based on badges) some experience with some community-moderating.
Of course, it is an imperfect measure - as everything that reduces some complex thing to a single number. It is definitely better to know how the user behaved on the site to help you decide whether to vote for them.
But it is at least a quick approximation - if you do not know the user, it tells you something.
There is at least some correlation between experience with the site and reputation, history of helping with moderation and site maintenance and some specific badges, number of review tasks, number of close/repoen votes, etc.
 
 
5 hours later…
gmvh
gmvh
9:53 AM
@GabeK in reponse to this concern, I put myself forward as a "lesser evil" candidate to give voters the option to effectively vote against an obviously unqualified candidate. I intend to withdraw my nomination as soon as there are a sufficient number of properly qualified candidates (i.e. once two more qualified candidates have stepped forward, so a real vote is possible).
7
 
 
6 hours later…
Gabe K
Gabe K
3:42 PM
@gmvh Thank you for doing that. I think that's a great idea.
@MartinSleziak Thanks! I appreciate the shared sentiment as well.
 
 
1 hour later…
Nike Dattani
Nike Dattani
4:56 PM
@MartinSleziak have you considered nominating yourself? I think you'd be a great candidate!
 
Vladimir Dotsenko
Vladimir Dotsenko
@gmvh thank you very much indeed for stepping in.

Full disclosure (in the context of the list of nominations as of this morning): I suggested to my PhD student Pedro Tamaroff (https://mathoverflow.net/users/21326/pedro-tamaroff) to consider running in the election. He previously served as a moderator on Math.Stackexchange, and I think that such a combination of maths expertise and experience in the context of the Stackexchange project would make him a great moderator. (I would not want to run myself - let's say I am a bit too grumpy and impatient when encounter behaviours that are suboptim…
3
 
Martin Sleziak
Martin Sleziak
I appreciate that you though of me, however I think that there are many reasons why I would not be suitable as a MO moderator. (I will not go into detail here, for the purpose of this thread the only relevant information is that I do not plan to run as a candidate in the election on MO.) In any case, good luck to the users who decide to throw their hats into the ring. — Martin Sleziak Mar 25 at 15:25
 

« first day (1 day earlier)      last day (35 days later) »