Workplace 2014 Election

2:03 AM

209 users have already voted in the election. There are 356 people who have visited the election page. Interesting stuff, we have a lot of people interested in the outcome it would seem!

jmort253

@jmac Yep, people exercising their right to vote... it's great to see...

Monica Cellio

@jmac yes, that's way more than I expected this early. Excellent turnout! (I suspect I'm not the only one who hasn't yet cast all of my votes. You get the badge as soon as you cast one.)

jmort253

It's quite a turnout when you actually look through the names!

The silent majority...

Monica Cellio

Lots of names I don't know, and one so far that I didn't know was here but I recognize from another site. Interesting to see who's here and mostly quiet.

jmac

The magic of community. We think of the vocal few, but the community actually consists of the non-vocal many. And that's a good thing.

jmort253

2:12 AM

Yep, everything we say is being seen by tens of hundreds of people.

Kinda like in one of those movies where the person has ghosts watching them....

jmac

"I see voting people"

jmort253

lol

jmac

Really makes me want to scrape the reputation of the users, and toss them in to a histogram. As is my wont. But I will restrain myself as that would take time and my jquery is rubbish.

jmort253

Save your energy :) Y'all may need it...

Seth

Wow, biography writers answering that questionnaire.

Better than on my site where half the candidates didn't even bother :P

jmort253

2:15 AM

BTW I really appreciated reading your answers to the questionaire, @jmac and @MonicaCellio and @Jim. You mentioned a lot of things I either didn't think of or had forgotten...

@Seth Yeh, all our candidates are awesome.

And that's just scratching the surface.... there's a lot of great users on our site who aren't on that election page...

jmac

@jmort253 I thought @Monica's was yours until about halfway through, and I thought yours was CMW's for the first couple answers.

(I tried my best not to cheat and look at who was giving the answers before reading them all to try to form a more unbiased opinion)

jmort253

@jmac Yeh I tried not looking at names, but then once I started guessing wrong I figured I'd look at names, otherwise I'd be thinking about it like a senile person....

Monica Cellio

@jmort253 likewise; I saw new insights from all of the other answers. Lots to think about.

Seth

@jmort253 I'm not very familiar with any of you, but that seems to be true :)

Monica Cellio

@jmac ooh, I didn't realize was doing a @jmort253 impersonation.

jmac

2:19 AM

I was 90% of the way through mine when Jim posted his, but after reading the other 3 that are there, I really wished I had waited so I could have 'borrowed' some of the better ideas for my own.

Monica Cellio

I had written most of mine before seeing any others and tried not to let the others influence me, but one never knows.

jmort253

@jmac Your head is screwed on good... you don't need to cheat...

jmac

> I see two reasonable next steps here and I've used both, depending on some fuzzy evaluation of the specific situation. One is to post on meta asking about this case ("is this an answer according to our guidelines?" or the like), summarizing anything that's been brought up in comments or custom flags on the post. This should elicit responses that explain, in more space than a custom flag allows, either what's wrong with the post or why those other flags are wrong.

Monica Cellio

(I wrote about half of mine before the list went up, truth to tell, 'cause it was obvious that some of those were coming.)

jmac

That is your answer Monica, so I was totally and completely conned in to thinking you were jmort because you said, "I've used both" which implies you are a moderator. It wasn't until I got down to the hot question issue, and then a link to a chat room with an odd name that it dawned on me.

@jmort253 Clearly I do need to cheat! I was totally wrong about who was who until I'd gotten halfway through them.

Monica Cellio

2:22 AM

@jmac oh, oops. I said in my nomination blurb that I'm already a mod on other sites, but I guess I didn't say that here.

jmort253

@MonicaCellio Yeh when I saw that I was like, wait, that's not jmac! and I didn't write that...

Monica Cellio

@jmort253 just keeping y'all on your toes. :-)

jmort253

I found it odd writing answers to these... because I think I switched awkwardly from past tense to present/future tense a few times.

I was trying to write from the perspective of a candidate, not a seasoned mod....

in the end I think I addressed questions about the future as a candidate and questions about the past/present as a mod....

Monica Cellio

I had some tense issues too because of that. If a question spoke to something I've handled as a mod I tended to drop into past tense, but then for others I had to use "I would" or "I will" language, and I started to edit the whole thing for that and ended up punting.

jmac

@MonicaCellio I knew you were a mod on other sites, but the way it was written (and the first paragraph tone) made me start with an assumption of mod of TWP. I mean, it could have been Jim or jmort! Totally didn't expect that plot twist.

Oh man, you guys realize what tense you're writing in? That's pretty advanced stuff. I re-read what I wrote, but if I even consider tense, it's subconscious.

jmort253

2:26 AM

@jmac "Coordinating with the Community Team" <---- speaks volumes that you get this! They have a tough job, which is to sort through the BS feature requests and actually see the real deal.....

@MonicaCellio Glad it wasn't just me.... I was starting to feel like a schizophrenia patient....

Monica Cellio

@jmac "plot twist" -- my fellow mods on Writers would be proud. :-)

jmort253

@jmac - You read my mind here: "Clearer Guidelines for Contributors"

I was thinking, how awkward is it that I've been dropping these back it up rule links all over posts, and those links point to a meta discussion....

it feels awkward to link to help/on-topic for the back it up rule, because the title is "Asking" not "Answering"

So... the ability to edit some of the How to Answer pages would be helpful...

jmac

@jmort253 I get that it's tough. I see what Shog writes, and realize that they are trying to herd cats with the current SE network, and it requires patience on all sides to see what the needs are of the people running it moving forward, and figuring out how to improve the chances for our community as a part of that in the process.

jmort253

Jim mentioned "Scope/appeal". Specifically, the technical questions....

jmac

If elected, I intend to totally revamp our help center. It really needs it. When you link to on-topic to explain why a question is off-topic, and link to 'dont-ask' to explain to someone why their question isn't actually a question that's on-topic, you know you have an issue.

jmort253

2:31 AM

I don't think it's as big of a problem as initially.... we get a lot of outsiders now.

@jmac Yeh, the challenge there is we can only edit the ask page.

jmac

Yeah, I'm not too worried about our growth (we will get more and more hits from google -- seriously, researching answers to some of our questions comes up with high hits for our questions on the same topics which is great)

jmort253

Only some stuff is editable and the rest is templated across the entire network.

jmac

@jmort253 I will refer you to, 'Coordinating with the Community Team' ;)

jmort253

lol

jmac

Of all the changes that we may want to have made, I think that allowing us to edit our own help center is probably one of the easier ways to do it. After all, they have a way to allow us to edit some of them, so it's likely just some switch to flip on the back end to apply that to other sections (like answering, or the close reasons, etc.)

And since we have a community manager-turned-dev in Anna Lear, and a TWP regular/dev in Oded, I think we can probably find a way to get it done if we use the appropriate amount of pleading via the proper channels.

jmort253

2:35 AM

@MonicaCellio - You also got me thinking how nice it would be to have a collection of meta resources available.... not quite pro-forma comments, but an easier way to reach for key meta posts and blog posts for custom comments.

Maybe the answer there is just to put just links in the pro-forma script.....

like really raw material...

Monica Cellio

@jmac what you say makes a great deal of sense. I think those pages are overdue for an overhaul. Thanks for bringing this up.

jmort253

and..... tagging, @MonicaCellio....

I forgot we have tags.....

jmac

I didn't. That's why I want Rhys to run. He did a great job before, and he has a good head on his shoulders to sort those out.

@MonicaCellio Well overdue. I hope that whoever is elected actually takes action on it (no offense intended @jmort)

Monica Cellio

@jmort253 sometimes links in the pro-forma script are the way to go. Probably not always. I haven't yet reviewed our key meta posts and the help center to see what's where and what ought to be where, but there's work to do I think.

jmort253

With fresh mods who are full of energy and active, I think we'll get to focus on other areas that have been neglected....

jmac

2:40 AM

I really want someone to do a Shog-esque, "This is what I'm changing and why" and just do it. Nobody voted on the current help center wording as a whole (from what I can tell), and we won't know if it works well unless we try it. The only harm would be the temporary inconvenience of having comments pointing to the pages be a wee bit less accurate temporarily.

Monica Cellio

@jmort253 the asker of that question gets the credit, not me. I sometimes see a tag that seems odd and ask myself if our tags are coherent, but I haven't yet done anything about it. I'd like the activity there to come from users, but the election has brought out that we should look at it.

jmort253

@jmac I've done that before on other sites when there wasn't input.... I just .... did stuff....

jmac

@jmort253 Yeah, I think it would work here too. The issue is that we have a lot of intelligent opinionated people (much like SO), and that sometimes the best approach is to just do it.

jmort253

@Rachel was heavily involved... I think she wrote a lot of it.

Monica Cellio

We don't need to discuss everything before doing it. Discuss the things that are likely to be controversial, or will take a good deal of work (that might have to be reverted), or that are disruptive (like retaggings that bump), but for many things I think the right path is "be bold".

jmort253

2:42 AM

yep.... better to just do stuff, yet be ready to make more tweaks, than to be paralyzed...

jmac

A lot of our help center is currently very similar to other help centers I thought. At least when looking around they felt quite similar.

@jmort253 "Strong opinions, held weakly" (not weekly though, that'd just be crazy)

jmort253

@MonicaCellio That's one thing I noticed you mentioning.... it's not a problem for you to just say, "Hey jmort, I see you closed X, mind if I reopen it" and it's not a big deal

honestly, when I first became a mod everything involved talking things out with 3 people, and it was tough.... took your energy....

sometimes it's best to take action while you're energy is hot.

jmac

@MonicaCellio Yes. I am a big advocate of boldness. Much to the chagrin of some members of the community.

jmort253

and what I mean by that is things like editing the help center or retagging stuff or just making executive decisions.

Monica Cellio

@jmort253 yeah, I think for things that the community could be involved in, that aren't private in any way, it's better to bring it up publicly than privately. I don't mean picking fights publicly, but just "hey, you say X and I say Y; can we talk?" -- do it in a way that everybody who wants to be involved can be, and if the discussion goes beyond the two of us and people become more engaged as a result, win.

@jmort253 yes, agreed.

We shouldn't be afraid to act on stuff that seems non-controversial -- and hey, if we were wrong about that, we can fix it. But let's not get paralyzed trying to decide if it's ok to edit a tag wiki or a help-center page.

jmort253

2:47 AM

sounds like a good plan to me.

jmac

Taking a look at the aggressive edits question though, I realized it was Simon who was opposed to the concept. Funnily enough if you look at the election page the very same Simon says:

> Certainly has my vote. Easily the baseline of what a moderator should be

jmort253

Kinda wish there was a stats board, kind of like in the US presidential elections where you can see the states turn blue or red depending on which candidate the state voted for.

jmac

There have been discussions on meta.so about that before, but the conclusion if I remember correctly was that allowing people to see the potential results of the election (or number of votes even) prior to the end will influence voting and probably isn't a net positive.

jmort253

@jmac Yeh, people don't have to agree with you to respect or even like you....

just don't be a jerk, and you win in life...

4

jmac

I'd also figure that because of the voting method, it would be very difficult to actually do the math (since you'd have tons of colors for each state that would differ depending on the results in another state)

jmort253

2:50 AM

yeh, definitely not cut and dry....

jmac

@jmort253 This idea is interesting to me. I may want to receive your newsletter.

jmort253

3:27 AM

"Don't be a jerk. Even if you're brilliant, don't be a brilliant jerk." - Girish Mathrubootham, CEO/Founder of Freshdesk

Tweeted by fellipeeduardo on February 11, 2014 at 4:44 AM

Love this quote.

jmac

6:58 AM

@jmort253 Very on point. I may have to take that in to consideration moving forward.

RhysW

7:58 AM

@jmac This is what i did on Astronomy. 'This is what i've done, any other suggestions?' and then worked with the community to refine it,

@jmac tage are fun, i like tags, its still on my list to do a lot of work on all of them, when i finally get to it

@Shog9 Oops!! How could i miss this! Will be top of my list

jmac

@RhysW Man, I'm up against 4 current mods this election. When will the attack ads start saying, "jmac only has one year of experience on Stack Exchange, and no moderation experience at all. Are you prepared to have him handle your flags? Does he even know what a flag is? I am RhysW, and I approve this message."

gnat

10:55 AM

@jmac yeah your competition is tough, but with all due respect, competition at SO '13 elections was substantially harder :)

jmac

11:09 AM

@gnat I would have about as much luck in an SO election as your average programmer would have in a sales job methinks.

gnat

@jmac no, for elections like this year, your chances could be pretty decent I think. :) There were good candidates, lots of them... but nothing compared to previous year... Workplace elections feel somewhat harder in comparison to SO '14

jmac

@gnat I wouldn't say this election is hard. No matter who ends up the mods, The Workplace wins!

gnat

@jmac it's not hard for you because you're candidate. As a voter, I am having a very hard time choosing, that's why it resembled me SO '13 elections (love and hate when it happens:)

RhysW

@jmac This made me laugh, a lot.

but in all seriousness, i agree with gnat, i had a hard time picking what 3 i would vote for

almost finished answering those questions for the elections

almost

RhysW

11:44 AM

0

A: 2014 Moderator Election Q&A - Questionnaire

What would you do if you found a flagged, positively scored answer where 10 users flagged it as not an answer and 10 users flagged it as invalid? How would you handle a case where the community is clearly divided on what to do with a post, yet the community is also unable to remove the post on...

2

Sorry for the delay! here are some answers

CMW

you beat me to it after all. I will finish it later today. work keeps me busy for a change :D

RhysW

I wrote it without reading anyone elses answers, so i wasnt tempted to copy anything

will be interesting to see who i share similarities to

CMW

I haven't even had time to read other answers yet :)

Yannis Rizos

12:29 PM

@jmac Yes, more than half that visited the election page, voted. That's pretty high, in comparison. Although, the first election is always the more exciting one (and I don't think any of the elections in my answer was the first ever for the site)...

enderland

@YannisRizos be curious what percentage of voters are actually site regulars and have any idea who they are voting for...

RhysW

→ 80 messages moved to The Water Cooler

← 2 messages moved from The Water Cooler

Yannis Rizos

12:57 PM

@enderland The rep requirement to vote is a bit low imho, but if memory serves the MSO request to raise it was declined.

enderland

150 is really not enough imo. who knows, I guess Workplace pretty much wins no matter who gets elected of the candidates

Monica Cellio

@jmac laugh Nice. But in all seriousness, we have a good slate of candidates, and no matter who wins we'll be in good hands. And being a mod isn't an automatic ticket to victory either.

Yannis Rizos

@enderland Yes, this is the first election I've participated where I don't care who wins, all candidates can cope with the role's responsibilities. Next time, we need a joke candidate or two, just to make things interesting.

RhysW

@YannisRizos You could have been our joke candidate if you wanted!

enderland

@YannisRizos part of me is tempted to vote for those who are less active in community moderation, just to increase the overall moderation of the site.... not sure this is the best voting idea. bwahaha

RhysW

1:12 PM

@enderland diabolical :P

i can see you stroking your cat now, plotting schemes in a swivel chair

Yannis Rizos

1:28 PM

@RhysW Heh, next time I guess... (jokes aside, I wouldn't troll an election. I've been through one, I know it's a bit stressful for the candidates, trolling doesn't help).

RhysW

1:40 PM

@YannisRizos Yes, stressful, right.

is it weird that im not stressed then? i sort of enjoy it

enderland

It's probably more stressful when it's not "everyone wins" situations

RhysW

yeah probably

Monica Cellio

@enderland probably. I'm not feeling stressed at all over this. I'm content to remain a regular user, or if y'all elect me that's fine too. Whatever.

RhysW

I wish i could have voted for more people

as it is i had to miss 2 :(

I reckon jmort is definitely one of them, his name is everywhere, id be surprised if any user here didnt know it

Monica Cellio

3. You did vote for yourself, I trust? :-)

@RhysW I will be astonished if jmort doesn't win.

RhysW

1:51 PM

@MonicaCellio you can do that? didnt even attempt it

@MonicaCellio agreed,

he does far too much and is far too friendly not to have atleast 75% of the site vote for him

Monica Cellio

@RhysW yes, same as you could if you were running for public office or something. It's not like voting up your own posts.

RhysW

Oh well, i dont regret not doing it

Monica Cellio

(I think you can re-arrange your votes at will up until the election closes, in case you want to change anything.)

RhysW

Nope, im happy with my votes, was sad enough when i thought i missed 2 people let alone 3!

enderland

I'll be curious to see the vote breakdown though

RhysW

1:56 PM

Is that ever shown?

enderland

yeah

RhysW

nice, will be interesting to see

Monica Cellio

The (anonymized) voting data will be published after the election, yes. After the Mi Yodeya election I did some me-focused analysis of that. :-) (The question I was trying to answer was where my candidacy fell on the "consensus -- divisive" line.)

RhysW

@MonicaCellio what did you find? if you dont mind my asking

Monica Cellio

@RhysW I got a lot of first-place votes from a smaller group of people -- that is, I won (in the third slot) because I had strong support from some, but of the winners I had the smallest number of people who cast any vote for me. I kept that in mind as I set out to moderate the site. (Religious pluralism had been an issue on the site, and somewhat still is, and I wondered how my perspective was going to affect things.)

This is not the kind of result I expect here, by the way. :-)

RhysW

2:22 PM

@MonicaCellio Ahh thats quite interesting, might ask how you did it at the end of this election then see how things are

Monica Cellio

@RhysW the election results include a row for each vote, indicating first/second/third choices by candidate number. I used this to count up, for each candidate, the number of votes of each type (and the total votes), and went from there. I didn't do any "people who liked X also liked Y" analysis, but it's possible.

RhysW

@MonicaCellio Now that would be an interesting one, see if certain mods are usually grouped together or seperated

Jim

3:10 PM

I'm kinda hoping I don't get kicked to the curb; I don't even have enough rep to close/repoen without a diamond

But at the same time, I'm sure the other candidates will be more than able to make up for loss of closevoters

so one the one hand it is a bit tense/stressful because we don't know what the results will be

but on the other hand, whatever the results are, I'm sure it will be a good choice

gnat

3:27 PM

@Jim 200+ voters make it really unpredictable; whatever hopes whoever has, forget it. We are having interesting elections indeed. Unpredictable

13 hours ago, by jmac

209 users have already voted in the election. There are 356 people who have visited the election page. Interesting stuff, we have a lot of people interested in the outcome it would seem!

CMW

3:43 PM

It is done

0

A: 2014 Moderator Election Q&A - Questionnaire

What would you do if you found a flagged, positively scored answer where 10 users flagged it as not an answer and 10 users flagged it as invalid? How would you handle a case where the community is clearly divided on what to do with a post, yet the community is also unable to remove the post on...

2

RhysW

@CMW congrats! welcome to the party

CMW

woohoo, thanks

now to go offline :)

(to go home and come back on)

RhysW

(Y) me too in about 30 mins

CMW

see ya later

Monica Cellio

@RhysW great point about the "share" button being an available tool for fixing problems. Bring things into chat and get the community's help, yes.

Also good point about breadth; just the other day somebody was asking me if this site is only for office workers or if, say, plumbers or construction workers could ask questions here. We've got work to do on breath.

RhysW

3:57 PM

I feel like ive given such short answers compared to most of the candidates

@MonicaCellio yeah, i do like the share button, its more than just advertising to other people what you like, can be a good tool to get a link to a place that might need help, direct others in that direction too

@MonicaCellio all of your answers are so good

Monica Cellio

@RhysW thank you. I've gotten some new insight/idea from each of the others; we're better together than individually.

@CMW good point about flagging a problem post to kick it into the review queue. Flagging by moderators has valid use cases and this is a key one.

RhysW

@MonicaCellio definitely agree there, will be an interesting match up between mods

enderland

@Jim obv you just need to post more answers (and get @gnat to do so while you're at it)

I really don't like seeing so many low rep users I don't even recognize voting in this election, honestly....

gnat

4:38 PM

@enderland as for me, I definitely plan for that after newly elected moderators will be there to off-load janitorial stuff to them. :) Surprisingly, 3K privileges feel missing to me here. For comparison, I dropped under 3K few times with bounties at MSO and it felt totally painless, thought it will be the same at Workplace with graduation drop... but it wasn't

gnat

5:39 PM

@enderland rep is not very reliable way to recognize commitment to the site. It works more or less when high, but low rep hardly indicates low commitment. Low rep user who frequently visits, reads and votes may be in perfect shape to vote in elections. I think we sort of miss "citizenship level" metric:

184

Q: Replace accept rate with citizenship level

I see that accept rate has now been removed from display on questions. I think this is not a great solution for reasons that waffles explained well. Take it away waffles! On one hand accept rate bothers me a lot, it is a one-dimensional metric that does not really give me enough information ab...

Jim

5:50 PM

@enderland just did!

thought you were going to say low-rep in the election (I'm the lowest by a good amount)

enderland

@Jim no I mean all those who have like 100-200 rep

@gnat I'm meaning REALLY low rep, like 101 or 200 or so

Jim

6:13 PM

on that scale my ~2900 doesn't look so bad

but next to the 4k+ and 10k+ of the other candidates, it's pretty small

RhysW

@Jim its ok Jim,size isnt everything, you have the added plus of all that mod work already done building up to help you!

2

Jim

ha, maybe "small" wasn't the best word

gnat

@RhysW agree, at these elections rep diffs are largely irrelevant. Although, per my recollection at SO and Programmers elections these were irrelevant as well

RhysW

@Jim sorry Jim, saw an opportunity and went for it

Jim G.

6:44 PM

@gnat You're absolutely right. I rarely participate in "Me too" questions, and I know that several high rep users (though certainly not all) have racked up many points on these types of questions.

jmac

11:52 PM

@MonicaCellio I actually strongly disagree that we need to work on breadth. More and more we are getting questions from people in other industries or types of jobs. I have seen people working in construction, retail, etc. ask questions, and I think that as long as we have content that is useful to them (and much of our content applies to all industries), we will get more questions from people who find us through that content

Transcript for

Workplace 2014 Election