What are the community's/network's expectations with regards to time investment for moderators?

@Grace is there a "recommended" (suggested) minimum amount of time that a mod should participate?

also, for the record. I think its a bad idea to have candidates go for the election that dont really want it. It sets a bad example and what would happen if the individual that didnt really want it gets elected?

Depends on your site. It's a volunteer job, first and foremost, so among other things "Not so much that it interferes with actual jobs/academia/etc."

I kinda feel like I once saw a suggested time somewhere, but I may have made that up.

AS a GD.SE mod I think we balance out the site's duties well and we commute if any issues arise and need to find resolution. With my slammed workload I visit about every other day

@GraceNote then look at this please: graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/election/4#post-109363

@DᴀʀᴛʜVᴀᴅᴇʀ ...geh

But if all the mods visited every other day - there'd likely be problems arising.

@WELZ um, no. We have several mods across the world so when they're normally active I might still be asleep. So that would mean a mod is ALWAYS present on the site if something arises.

Ryan and I are the only US based mods, per memory.

@Cai I believe is UK, he can clear that up

@Wrzlprmft I think was Germany??

@DᴀʀᴛʜVᴀᴅᴇʀ I am

Our mods time zones:

and to that, Ryan and I are both east coast but I think Ryan was looking to move to West Coast so that would change time zones.

@DarthVader and how do you find visiting every other day? Are you catching up sufficiently? I contemplated checking on the Data explorer see if there was a query for moderators' activity :-)

@Emilie no issues what-so-ever. I know my fellow mods are doing a great job and I'd to think we're pretty open if someone needs time off or would be gone for an extended time

@Cai thoughts?

I will be there pretty much everyday for a few months starting next week but would likely become fairly inactive in November and be back a few months later

@Emilie I dont think that be an issue, end of year is typically my slower time due to holidays, my busy time started last month and ends typically in July.

Honestly the time investment isn't significant at all. The majority of mod-work is handling flags... most of which are non-urgent and there's rarely more than a handful of flags to deal with

@Emilie I would 100% vote for you if you run and hope you will :) the time commitment on here isn't much. When something serious does happen which is maybe 3 or 4 times a year it can be a little time consuming that day then it goes back to being quiet and mundane and mostly runs itself

Too bad we aren't getting 2 spots :/

@Ryan See my deal is this summer I'm taking care of my thesis so I will be on SE everyday most likely and thinking long and hard about any governance issues since that's my topic but come November, I'm having a newborn which sort of throws a wrench in the gears lol...

@Emilie early congrats

@DarthVader Thanks!

If the new baby is like my daughter was, she'd spend most of her time sleeping on me while I did research online so that wouldn't be a problem but it's really a lottery. How is the quantity of spots for moderators determined?

congrats! and I think thats fine. Darth has taken time before, Vincent had when he was still modded up, CAI has taken time. Right now I'm marked on leave. I lurk a little when I have time and am trying to at least keep up with issues and the election to know what's going on but thats about all I have the energy for right now

@Emilie ya I was fortunate to be a freelance designer with a sleeping baby when mine was born

Think of it this way - if JohnB, Yisela, or Vincent wanted their diamonds back. They could instantly and without election just by asking. Giving up the diamond is really just a long sabbatical in the eyes of SE. So running has a lot of upside with very little downside risk.

@DarthVader Hurray for Canadian maternity leave because I was freelancing, teaching full time and a graduate student all at once :-S

@Emilie ya we dont have that, in America we had 6 weeks so wifey went back to work and I got to be a stay at home dad =P

@Ryan That is great information Ryan, thanks, I was actually wondering about that.

@Ryan Is that really how it works? Never knew that

So are the nominations permanently extended by 7 days or is this stopped as soon as a 2nd nomination comes in?

@WELZ if you get the tattoo, it's a little diamond, part of the initiation

@Emilie ping @GraceNote

I think it's just extended

@Emilie It's just plain extended

Thank you, I'll just run it by my supervisors to make sure it doesn't interfere with my research and if I'm cleared I'll write up my nomination

@MartinZaske @WELZ @Emilie (I hope I got everybody) A few notes on time demand and urgency:

1) Everything really urgent (spam, people shitting on the site) is usually dealt with by the community or Charcoal nowadays (this was not always the case). Thus there is no need for someone to be present all the time.

2) There are mainly two types of moderation tasks: a) flag handling, which is all sorts of exception handling, but doesn’t take much time. In most cases it’s fine if this is dealt with within a day. b) longer projects like carefully nudging problem users in the right direction, steering the community (see one of my questions on the questionnaire), reviewing the reviewers. This can be somewhat tedious, but it’s not urgent at all.

3) Taking a holiday or a short hiatuses from moderating is completely normal. All of us do it. In fact, one of the reasons we have more than a few moderators is to be able to cover cases where two prolific moderators are on holiday at the same time.

Nomination incoming but I was over by 3000 characters...thanks academia -_-

@Emilie Hmm, you must be living in a different academia than me.

@Wrzlprmft Social studies :-) I have a colleague who has his PhD in chemistry, I tend to run my stuff through him and I think a good 30% of the words get cut off!

@Emilie Don’t you have space restrictions for abstracts and stuff?

@Wrzlprmft Definitely! I just wasn't aware of the space restriction when I typed my nomination so I was in for a bit of a surprise when I pasted it in