Moderator Action Review Process
After much discussion, debate, reflection, consultation, frustration, revelation, constipation and inspiration, we've settled on the following process for allowing a team of moderators to remove one of their own. It is, by necessity, somewhat formal: this process is for those rare situations where communication with one member has completely broken down and the team as a whole feels they cannot continue to work together.
I strongly urge anyone involved in such a situation to do what they can to resolve outstanding issues before resorting to this.
Initiation
The process will be initiated by a formal request from one or more moderators on a site, sent privately via an email to community@stackexchange.com.
The process may also be initiated by the Community Team at Stack Exchange, Inc. in response to numerous, substantiated complaints from users on the site.
In either case, the complaints will be treated by Stack Exchange as confidential, and their authors will not be named by us at any point in the process.
Proceedings
Once begun, the following steps must be followed, in order, to completion within a reasonable time frame. If this is not possible, all participants will be notified by us that the process has been discontinued and informed of the resolution (if any).
All moderators on the site will be contacted by us via email, informed of the situation and asked to meet at their earliest opportunity to discuss the removal of the named moderator. Meeting must be held in a private venue to maintain the confidentiality of those involved — we will provide a chat room on http://chat.meta.stackexchange.com that is inaccessible to anyone not invited. Both the venue and timeframe for the meeting must be accessible to all moderators — we will attempt to coordinate the schedules of individual moderators.
At the designated time, a quorum must be present — this shall consist of ⅔rds (rounded up) of the moderators on the site (all those listed as active on the /users?tab=moderators page, whether or not currently active), excluding the moderator to be removed (example: for a team with three moderators, both of those not being considered for removal must be present).
A designated person will be selected to record the minutes of the meeting. These should be brief, and suitable for public consumption should the need arise (providing only a broad overview of the process and its outcome, not including any details of what was discussed).
At this point, each present member of the moderator team shall be given an opportunity to share their concerns with the group. In the event that this process was initiated by complaints from outside the moderator team, a summary of them will have been provided to the moderators prior to the meeting.
Following this, the moderator to be considered for removal shall have a chance to respond. There will be no back-and-forth discussion allowed — this should have been conducted prior to this meeting.
Finally, the moderator to be considered for removal shall be asked to leave the room (upon which access to the chat room shall be revoked) and otherwise remain silent through the remainder of the proceedings, and those remaining shall vote on whether or not to revoke the moderator's privileges.
If at least ⅔rds of those present vote for removal, this shall be considered a consensus, and recorded in the minutes as the opinion of the moderator team.
The meeting shall now be concluded, and the minutes emailed to all members of the moderator team and community@stackexchange.com.
If the consensus was for removal, we will then revoke the privileges of the moderator to be removed, and also remove the moderator's name from the election and /users?tab=moderators pages.
How — or if — the outcome of such a meeting is shared with the broader community will be left to the discretion of the moderator team. However, the details of the meeting must remain confidential — only the minutes can be published if such a need arises. This is done to allow potentially-confidential information to be disclosed without forcing anyone involved to violate the moderator agreement.
In general, the same courtesies should be extended toward removed moderators as to suspended users: no airing of dirty laundry in public, no bringing up issues faced as a moderator in unrelated discussions, questions raised by other members of the public answered with as little detail as possible. Speculation should be discouraged out of respect for those involved.
This has been copied from an older post here.