Experimenting with Pro Tempore elections

Question

Last spring, I ran an election on Parenting for a new moderator pro tempore. It went pretty well, so this fall we are going to extend the program to sites that have been in "beta" for years. Here's how it works:

1. We're reaching out to moderator teams to see if they would be interested in participating. Priority will go to sites with the longest history or that we've identified as having an urgent need. The ultimate goal is to have elections for all sites.

2. Once I've determined how many moderators the election should add, I'll schedule the election and post an announcement on the per-site meta.

3. For these elections, the candidate questionnaire is an optional feature that individual sites can choose if they want (example here). If sites choose not to have a questionnaire, we encourage voters to ask their questions on the site's meta use the discussion and election tags. Moderator candidates should monitor meta for these questions.

4. Current moderators will not be required to nominate themselves—they will continue as moderators unless they ask to step down. (NB: Existing moderators currently get an email saying they must nominate themselves, but this is because the automated system does not yet know about pro tempore elections. Please ignore the instruction to nominate yourself if you get this email.)

5. Unlike most elections, we won't require pro tempore elections to be competitive. If the number of nominees is less than or equal to the number of open slots, we'll end the election before the voting stage. (It should be very rare, but the community team retains the right to remove candidates at any time. In particular, we disallow nominations from people who are recently suspended.)

6. When the election ends, I'll appoint the new moderator(s) as pro tempore moderators. (The distinction matters mostly for the Constable and Sheriff badges.)

The long-term goal here is to increase democratic participation in all of our sites, break down the barriers between beta and graduated sites and eliminate one community manager task. Over the years, we've appointed many moderators and while we seem to have a good track record, that probably has more to do with the population of users interested in the position more than our skill. Therefore, there's no reason for us to maintain control over who becomes moderator on beta sites.

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After several successful pro tempore (and one that's not yet succeeded) elections, I'm extending the program to Tezos, a newly launched public beta site. We'll see if this is a bridge too far.

Answer 1

Elections as a catalyst for discussion

Thank you! I've been waiting for an announcement like this for a while, and the big thing I'm really excited about is the potential to kindle interest in community moderation as a whole amongst the userbase. Elections have a tendency to bring the community together and focus on common goals. There's collective self-reflection about some of the big questions: What are the biggest problems on our site? Are the policies we've implemented successful? Where do we go from here?

As a long-term beta moderator - does three and a half years count? - these are questions that I haven't seen people talking about with gusto for some time, on some of my sites. Now, part of that is that we haven't had many problems. The road's been a quiet one, but smooth enough. I'd like to see some more proactivity - talking about even minor issues that we can address to polish the sites a little more. Elections often bring old and new faces alike out of the woodwork, which could mean a more diverse set of opinions.

Keeping this in mind, in lieu of a questionnaire, I'd be interested in maybe having candidates just write up a paragraph or two addressing the top two or three problems they want to address, just to imbue the whole thing with a sense of purpose. Essentially, they'd have to answer the question "What are [sitename]'s biggest problems?" briefly. No need to dig into a candidate's ideas on every issue; there just might not be enough substance there. I also doubt we could drum up support for a whole ten-question questionnaire, even if we wanted to. But this is smaller, and it can probably be implemented casually, on a per-site basis; I do intend to try it out and see what happens, if HSM or Mythology wind up having elections (we'll see).

So . . . in a sense, I look forward to the elections not just as a way to get new people involved, but also drum up new ideas and maybe kindle some discussions. This could flop, of course, but I'm optimistic. We'll see what happens.

What to look for in a candidate

I don't think I plan to do this myself, but I'm actually kinda interested to see what would happen if an existing mod decided to nominate themselves - to continue on if elected, and to step down if not. Part of my feels like it would either go really well or really poorly - really well because folks are (hopefully) happy with the status quo, or really poorly because normal things we look at during elections - meta posts, review queue stats, etc. - are going to be virtually nil. We get meta posts on HSM less often than a local monthly book club sends out a newsletter.

In a sense, this exposes something I'm worried about: candidates in general will have little to point at on some sites. When community moderation tasks are needed, they get done, but there aren't many to go around. I'm curious to see what characteristics will swing voters which way. The possible downside? Rep could swing voters' minds even more than it normally does. And . . . I worry about that. Not that my old betas have any high-rep users who aren't good people, but rep isn't really correlated with moderator ability, unless it's indicative of an old hand with plenty of experience with the scope and community moderation tools.

Again, this is something I guess we'll get a better grasp on going forward, and I'm not inclined to worry yet. I'll be interested to see if we can get some data or anecdotal evidence on this when the first wave of elections starts, but it'll be in the back of my mind.

Answer 2

I think that's a good idea. There's no reason why moderator should be selected differently based on the number of questions per day.

Given that the initial moderators will still be nominated, when would the first election takes place? If I understand correctly, either when a nominated moderator steps down, or when the site needs more moderators?

Current moderators will not be required to nominate themselves—they will continue as moderators unless they ask to step down.

Why? If the site is old enough to sustain elections (meaning that candidates have had a few months to get used to the site and to demonstrate their behavior), is it still useful to retain the initial nominated moderators?

For these elections, we won't be creating a candidate questionnaire. Instead, we encourage voters to ask their questions on the site's meta use the discussion and election tags. Moderator candidates should monitor meta for these questions.

Why? I don't see any reason to treat these elections differently.

I do have reservations about the current format of election questions. The selection is determined by voting, which is largely determined by how soon the question was posted to the question collection thread. But if anything this is less of a problem on younger sites, where there would rarely be 10 questions anyway.