Hmm. Nothing yet. Does anyone else find this surprising? I'm tempted to put myself up just to get things started. My statement would be William Tecumseh Sherman's: "If nominated I will not run; if elected I will not serve."
@RickDecker This site has low participation in governance so I'm not surprised that there isn't a rush. But I do hope we'll have a good panel of contenders.
Please declare a candidacy if you intend to run seriously, i.e. if you do intend to moderate if elected.
I currently do intend to nominate. But I don't want to scare others away!
You and R. are doing a good job. I'd support either of your nominations. I'd consider running once I retire from my day job; get back to me in a few years. grin
BTW, how do you know that "this site has low participation in governance"?
think the site has healthy participation as indicated by many high rep users. as for "governance" not sure what that is intended to refer to.
its quite striking (didnt notice this before! its not that much documented!) that even 300rep users are allowed to run! rep pts seem to be very critical for everything on the site except moderation!
as for anyone concerned about running & time reqs of mod job, think the job probably does not entail much more work than high rep users are already accustomed to spending on the site anyway.
so, hope some high rep users volunteer soon!
ofc actually hope to see any ranking members run, but from experience have seen elections tend to (naturally) lean toward rep.
I suspect that the SE team doesn't want to open themselves to complaints about exclusivity, which is why they set the nomination bar so low. In a practical sense, though, it probably doesn't make a difference, since rep carries with it a measure of how well a participant is known to the community. I for one would be reluctant to vote for someone who has a 310 rep, if for no other reason than I simply don't know them
In response to your "the job probably does not entail much more work than high rep users are already accustomed to spending on the site anyway", I'd question that. I regularly flag Q/A/comments, but not being a mod, I never see them in my review queues. I suspect the mods are a lot busier than you imagine.
@RickDecker it is hard for me to picture them much busier than high rep users. dont forget work is shared across 3 mods.
if the job is significantly time consuming then one would defn consider it not very forthright/ transparent of se management not to declare that beforehand.
congratulations to everyone on the site for achieving this huge, hard-won milestone at last!
Well, we'll have to see what they say when they weigh in. Frankly, I doubt the mod task is just a little bit harder than what I and others do routinely.
@RickDecker the mods have never said much about workload so far in this chatroom. in fact have never seen mods say much about it at all despite visiting very many chatrooms over several years & also chatting with numerous mods across se. also note that one could choose to decrease ones answer-work as a mod and use some of that time on mod activities instead.
special thx to excellent leadership of current mods, who helped get this site through its adolescence so to speak.
@RickDecker Check out any meta discussion. We have not been able to fix any policy during the last two years or so, because there was so little participation.
@RickDecker What concerns me more is that if there are many nominations, those with the most rep proceed to the next phase. That seems broken to me: high rep means many (and hopefully good) questions and answers, not envolvement in community moderation. But then, that's not going to be a problem for our election.
@RickDecker There are actually not so many things only a moderator can do: instant close/reopen and (un)delete, editing and deleting comments and handling flags are the only day-to-day things. (We don't get that many flags; deleting comments is probably what I do most out of these.)
These editing sprees I myself go on, every high-rep user can do.
The SE model considers mods to be exception handlers, not necessarily caretakers; the assumption is that the community governs itself, mostly. So it's not expected that you do a lot -- just that you do those things nobody else can.
Aside from the above, that includes caution/block users, destroy spammers, migrate anywhere, merge posts, and probably some more things I've never used. We also have access to some monitoring tools.
@RickDecker low meta participation, compared to other sites I participate in with a similar volume
@Raphael That only applies if there are more than 30 candidates. It's only ever come into play on SO, I think the record elsewhere is <20.
@vzn Moderator workload has been a recurring issue on MSO, but that's a completely different scale. SO gets upwards of a thousand flags per day. Here getting 10 would be an unusually busy day.
Most days, flag handling only takes a couple of minutes. Technically flag handling is the only thing that mods have to do (in the sense that if they don't do it, nobody else can). That and the occasional request in chat/meta (e.g. to merge tags).
But some days you run into a problem (a user starts vandalizing, an argument to defuse, etc.) and it can take a lot longer. I haven't measured so I couldn't give you an average.
I think if you plan on 1 hour/week you have time to do all the strictly required stuff and some time left for support and discussion on meta
@GraceNote I notice that the community bulleting does in no way indicate that users have to act now. The election is slated under "upcoming events" with an end date two weeks from now, and the featured meta posts say nothing about "nominate yourself now" (in their titles).
@GraceNote Also, are you sure we need an extra room for this? Our normal chat is certainly not so active that election talk would be drowned out by trivialities.
@Raphael Nomination? I was busy working on being too trigger-happy with the DELETE IT!!! IT'S WRONG!!! responses to prove my unsuitability to replace anyone in the existing excellent team. :-P
@Raphael I do not think we can rephrase the entry in the bulletin, that I'm aware of, but I can check on that. Or rather, I don't know if we can rephrase it so that the message is different per phase.
@DavidRicherby Well, that's for others to decide, isn't it? :P
The silent mass of dissatisfied users who dare not speak up against the powers that be, they should have options, too!
(Also, you assume that all three current moderators nominate themselves.)
@GraceNote Okay, thanks. If nothing else, we can create a featured post on Computer Science Meta with a fitting title -- and hope it's not lost in the noise.
@Raphael We set a separate room for every site as a standard approach, which I meant to say like 10 minutes ago but got distracted. In normal cases this is because of active rooms but also helps to keep discussion in one easy-to-find place. That way, for example, people can find information on any particular election just by looking at this room, rather than trying to find the right time period in the main room.
That said that's, as noted, the standard approach. if y'all think that this room is just causing more problems than anything else, we can fold it into the existing room.
@GraceNote Building on that, the way would probably be to have one featured post linking to the currently important pages, and unfeaturing the two posts featured now so as to reduce noise. The title and content of that post can be updated when the election moves forward.
@GraceNote I don't know that it creates problems, but we may get split discussions. We'll see. Or do you disagree, @Gilles?
@GraceNote Regarding "Upcoming Events", should the election not be under "Current Events"? (Is that even a thing?)
@DavidRicherby So, if you would be willing to do the job, I think you definitely nominate yourself! Even if you end up not getting elected, it's important that there was a real choice.
Besides, nominations by current mods are probably boring (I know mine is/will be).
You are invited on a prestigious mission to Mars to explode — ahem run tests on — the soil there. Clearly, you won't be able to moderate this site from there, and must reluctantly step down. Which, if any, of the other candidates would you recommend your voters go for, and why?
@Raphael my understanding of chat pings is that this will not ping DR because hes never posted in this room.
@Raphael this is rather pessimistic. there is significant participation in meta over time. agreed it is low on average. also the ref to "fixing policy" is questionable.
> After 7 days, the top 30 nominees, ordered by reputation, advance to the primary phase. However, if there are 10 or fewer candidates, we skip directly to the election phase.
@DavidRicherby (on other hand mods do seem to have some kind of mod-only chat-ping capability...?)
@YuvalFilmus plz read prior dialog on time estimates. probably not much different than your current sizeable contribution. & consider answering less if nec. youre a natural/ obvious/ leading candidate, you have solid/ strong instincts/ feelings on site scope/ direction etc...
@vzn But Yuval's by far the biggest contribution to this site is answering questions. You seem to be saying, "You're so great at answering questions that I think you should become a moderator and make time for it by not so much of the thing you're great at."
I'm not saying I think that Yuval would be a bad candidate; just that answering lots of questions doesn't really have anything to do with whether or not somebody would be a good moderator.
@Jake anybody (with ≥300 rep on the site) can nominate since about 24.5 hours ago
@GraceNote I hadn't thought of that, but if you're looking for historical discussions, it's not too much to ask to dig for the right date
the downside of having a separate room is that it's fragmented the discussions
it makes sense when the main room has significant non-election-related traffic, because not everybody cares what $regular1 had to drink yesterday night
@Jake Mechanically, only the one person can nominate themselves. On several elections, some users like to make a thread where they voice who they would nominate, usually to try and convince that person to run.
@DavidRicherby strongly disagree, and as stated earlier, se elections (apparently) often go the way of rep. answering questions well to the degree of earning points is the intellectually hardest activity on the site. seems to me, all other site management operations pale in comparison. points indicate the nearest possible to site consensus on good answers (the entire raison d'etre of the site!). that (consensus) is at times extremely difficult to achieve on a site like this yet very valuable.
@vzn You just said it yourself: answering questions is, intellectually, nothing like moderating. Reputation indicates consensus that somebody writes good answers. It doesn't indicate that the person would be a good (or bad) moderator.
maybe you would next like to devalue Gilles >600K rep. or Rs. or your own. as relevant to the site moderation.
(sigh) let me try to find a way to agree. agreed, rep alone is not indicative of leadership abilities which moderating involves to some degree. but that caveat applies to all of us.
am not really saying anything like those with the most points are the most worthy moderators. but its a key part of their stackexchange "resume" so to speak...
obviously do not want to see YF decrease his answers, but see that as some kind of possible compromise or "paying a small price" for him being in an "even more senior position" on the site.
like his style! :D
@Jake it is already open. nobody has stepped forward yet. yes SE elections are not very well documented. it seems even SE mgt may not exactly be that fond of them. they represent likely change in the status quo. great mods/ volunteers are hard to come by. they form a critical aspect of the site etc. yet do it for free.
from an election that happened ~1.5yr ago on Theoretical Computer Science, there was also a case of ppl (incl current mods) not stepping fwd until the last minute.
@Gilles se chat rooms are always fragmented anyway, even official ones. its somewhat unavoidable. esp by a widespread user culture that seems to largely avoid chat.
It's a bit shizophrenic, though: high rep does not tell you anything about moderation participation and aptitude, but without rep you don't get access to the tools that let you engage in moderation.
I'll do it more often now. I really only figured out this was a thing because I wanted to ask those questions. This seems like a good way to get to know the community a bit better
@Jake fyi take a look at 1st few msgs in meta they have more info also re election.
@Jake "figured out this was a thing"? are you talking about chat? yeah it seems well-concealed at times :( ... esp on beta sites (due to layout) ... complained about that once on se meta ... might have gotten deleted, dunno ...
Yes, I was referring to chat. I've heard people mention it in log comments threads but I had no clue what they were talking about. I found this page once and then was like "what is this?"
R/ DR: just noticed, the election page rates candidates by default metrics apparently important to SE ("candidate score" 0-40, never mentioned before) and maybe those ratings are more to your liking for mod scoring.
presumably, & a bit awkwardly/ inconveniently/ not-so-transparently, one can only find out ones own or others "candidate score" by/ after nominating.
since you guys assert that mod ability/ finesse etc is not highly correlated with rep or whatever, what (intangible?) qualities do you constructively espouse instead?
Raphael, thank you for your kind words. I do hope you'll nominate yourself! You're a role model for me. (as is Gilles -- fortunately, I saw his note that he plans to nominate himself as well, which is great news)
How can I find out what my election candidate score is?
For example, on Ask Ubuntu I'd like to see exactly what score I'd have out of 40.
A SEDE query would work but I'd like one nicely presented - an equivalent of flair would be really nice!
We believe deeply in community moderation. That's why we appoint Pro Tempore Moderators and, ideally, democratically elected community moderators for every site in our network. But what do community moderators do? The short answer is, as little as possible!
@Gilles ofc, yes, a classic. then theres this at the top of the essay, 2nd paragraph.
> Stack Overflow is run by you! If you want to help us run Stack Overflow, you'll need reputation first. Reputation is a (very) rough measurement of how much the Stack Overflow community trusts you. Reputation is never given, it is earned by convincing other Stack Overflow users that you know what you're talking about.
@Jake If not enough people nominate (at least 4 people in this case), we extend the nomination phase an extra week. If there's still not enough after that, we cancel the election and start trying to figure out why there's not enough interest in moderation in the community.
You are invited on a prestigious mission to Mars to explode — ahem run tests on — the soil there. Clearly, you won't be able to moderate this site from there, and must reluctantly step down. Which, if any, of the other candidates would you recommend your voters go for, and why?
2015 Computer Science Election
2015 Computer Science Election