In accordance with the RFC process, below are polls to adopt the wording of two separate rules. A Yes vote on these does not equate to you approving these as a binding rule. It means you are approving the wording and with approval we can move forward to a binding rule vote. A majority yes vote is required to move forward.
Rule 1: A stickied and locked thread shall be created in the About Unstuck forum listing all current moderators, the date they were appointed, and the date their term ends unless they choose to resign early.
Rule 1
Yes
No
0voters
Rule 2: Moderation Terms. The forum will be moderated by a rotating team of moderators, which is intended to promote consistent change and a spirit of community moderation. Moderators will serve for a term of approximately six months. Moderators’ terms of service will be staggered such that moderator terms end on a “Rotation Date”. The first Rotation Date will be September 1, 2021, and future Rotation Date will occur every two months. On each Rotation Date, any moderator who has served in their current term for at least 6 months will rotate out as a moderator and take a mandatory break from serving on the moderation team until the next Rotation Date.
Nominations and Elections. Two weeks prior to each Rotation Date, a nomination thread will be created in the About Unstuck forum requesting volunteers to serve as a moderator. Anyone who volunteers in the thread and receives at least 10 likes to their post will be nominated. After the nomination thread has been open for 3 days, the nomination thread will be closed, and another thread will be posted in About Unstuck with an individual poll for each nominee, which will will remain open for 3 days. Any nominee who receives at least two-thirds approval will be added to the mod team immediately. This means they should be in place for roughly 1 week prior to the Rotation Date, and a moderator’s term will last approximately 6 months and 1 week. For the sake of clarity, if a moderator’s six-month term ends on a Rotation Date of July 1, then they would be eligible for nomination in the mod approval process that leads up to the next Rotation Date (September 1). This rule replaces and makes all prior rules regarding mod terms null and void.
When this comes up for an actual binding vote, I’d appreciate your support. I think that people will take longer breaks in practice once we get this up and running, and we’ll also have more people participating as mods. Mandating longer breaks would likely scare off too many people for this to pass though.
We are a little over 1 day into the required 7 day voting period on the wording of our rules and so far voting looks strongly in favor of both. I want to use this time before we can officially vote on these as binding rules to begin the campaign for passage of these rules.
Let’s start with the background of why I’m taking this on. I’ve never been banned, or as far as I know had a single mod action taken against me on this forum. So I would seem an unlikely person to take up this charge. However, the thing I value most about this forum is the community of intelligent people brought together here that give me great insight across the entire left spectrum on political topics, but also incredible information across a number of topics of interest to me. Keeping this community together is in my self-interest and without significant intervention we were speeding towards a point of no return for keeping this together.
So let’s talk about the concept of an online community. In most cases forums take place on a website with an owner who has a business interest in the success of their forum and/or the website it is attached to. These forums, like many across the internet, are likely moderated by volunteers. If a user has an issue with the moderation of the forum though, there is a path to escalate the issue above the mod and potentially to the site owner or someone who will care about the business interests of the site. At that point they are able to make a decision as to whether the action of the moderator matches up with their business interests. In many cases they will back this mod up and in others they may reverse the decision and give guidance to steer the forum in a different direction.
As for Unstuck Politics, this site was created with an ideal of community ownership. When you hear that it sounds like everyone owns a piece of the site, but what it really means is there is no owner and there is no one who has any business or financial interest in the success of the site. In this setup the mods may still be volunteers, but especially when combined with a permanent position or implied permanence we have turned them into de facto owners of the site. Their only interest in how the site runs is to run it in a way that best suits them.
So how do we fix this? We create a system of moderation that prevents permanence and simultaneously encourages a changeover of duties amongst the community. This setup better instills a sense of duty to the community in the position. This also has the knock on effect of providing a healthy break to our mod team, and will hopefully draw in a larger group from the community willing to take a turn as a mod.
To this point, goofyballer correctly pointed out (paraphrasing here) that if I have such a great interest in fixing the forum and how mods should perform their duties that I should to some level back up my words by volunteering for mod duty. While I am unable to immediately serve in this duty, my commitment to the forum is that if rule 2 passes as written, I will volunteer to take my turn in the barrel with the mod rotation that starts January 1st 2022. If approved and the community approves of how I serve in the job, I will likely continue volunteering to serve a 6 month term starting January 1st of each year for as long as this community stays viable and interesting to me.
I’m withdrawing this promise and withdrawing my support from rule 2 (rule 1 seems to make common sense regardless). If anyone wants to see these passed, they will need to carry them across the finish line in my place.
My understanding is that it is, and that the procedure is for one of the admins to create a binding-vote poll in a separate thread. @admin can that be done? I’d suggest putting both polls in the same thread if that’s deemed acceptable, seems less cluttered than separate ones, but if separate seems clearer or something, that’s fine too.
Ok, I think everything has gone according to the process laid out here:
I’m creating a new thread with a yes/no poll for each of the 2 proposed rules, and will make it a banner. My reading of the linked post is that the poll will be open for 7 days, and the proposed rules will pass with 60% of votes.
Let me know if there’s any objection or I’ve misread anything. (Adminning after beers is probably not a good idea.)