What would you like to change about the moderator election process?

Question

Update – February 13th, 2024

Thank you to everyone who provided feedback and expressed their interest in joining the working group. The selection has been made, and those individuals have been invited. The chat room for the group is in gallery mode and can be seen here. Some changes were made to the tentative schedule as well to make it a bit more practical; you can see those reflected in the schedule towards the bottom of this post. Once an agreed-upon plan has been reached, we will share that with the community in a new update.

---

TL/DR

We are revisiting moderator elections with the community to discuss what they think needs to be improved. You can fill out this form to indicate your interest; those selected will be invited to join the working group on February 13th, 2024. Both moderators and non-moderators are welcome to sign up.

We have been running moderator elections the same way for quite some time; we see a number of things that we think could be improved for both the community and how community managers handle moderator elections. With that in mind, it’s time to take a step back and review the election process so that we can update it where it needs updating. One thing we would like to make abundantly transparent about this initiative is that we are not trying to sell you on a specific outcome. We want to make meaningful updates to the election process, but we want to do it with you.

How it currently works for Community Managers

Suffice it to say our existing process is in need of some automation, but our current election process generally looks like this:

• A mod team reaches out to Community Managers about needing an election. Alternatively, we may reach out due to resignations.
• CMs then discuss with mods workload, how many they need, and the urgency. (Ideally we would also discuss things like the mod teams goals: do they want to do more welcoming, or more education, for instance?)
• CMs weigh the need against existing election needs and find a time to slot in an election.
• CMs schedule the election and assign a CM to oversee it.
• CMs create the election page
• Depending on the election type, an announcement post is created.
• Question collection begins. CMs have to push a button to generate this post, but for pro-tem, we skip it. CMs need to keep an eye on these posts to monitor submitted questions because it's common for shenanigans to occur here.
• The Nomination Phase. An automation triggers an announcement of the election. Only eight questions can be submitted by the community. If there are more than that, CMs must decide which ones don’t make the cut. Once a questionnaire has been decided upon, we have to push some buttons to generate it and create the chat room for the election. This phase is pretty manual. We have to be on the lookout for shenanigans again and handle those accordingly. Please note that when shenanigans are identified, other CMs are brought into the process to discuss what, if anything, should be done about said shenanigans. A sole CM never handles it without some assistance.
• If there are not enough (or any) nominations, CMs will sometimes reach out to Mods to see if they are willing to speak with good candidates to join. If there are an insufficient number of candidates, the election will be extended by one week.
• If it's a pro-tem election and the nomination phase ends, those individuals are appointed.
• If there are sufficient nominations, then the voting phase begins. This is an automated phase, so it does not require CM input.
• At the end of the voting phase, a CM will push some buttons that calculate the votes, announce the winners, hand out diamonds, and send a welcome email. CMs will then welcome the mods into the various mod spaces.

Why are we doing this?

First, I want to share why we want to make some changes now and some things we, as a community management team, hope to get out of this.

As you know, the network has one hundred and eighty-two sites. Not every site needs an election on an annual basis; sometimes, a site only needs one, and sometimes, a site needs more than one annually. Other times, it might not need one for a couple of years. The seventy-two elections we ran over the last two years kept us pretty busy, and due to our current system, we would have a hard time doing too many more than that if the need arose without taking away from our other responsibilities. Moderator elections are a crucial part of the network, but they take up quite a bit of CM time. Specifically, CMs must do things at specific times to move elections along. This, among other manual actions that CMs must take, makes election handling very time-consuming. We believe that time would be better put towards work on other projects needing our attention. In addition, we want to give our communities more autonomy and control in dictating their site moderation needs rather than relying on the CM team to judge when moderators and elections are needed.

Something we would like to explore more with the community is transitioning away from CMs scheduling elections. This means the above-mentioned process is too reactive to site needs. We want to consider methods of empowering communities' autonomy to have more say when an election happens without needing to wait for CMs to find time to run them. We have done some cursory research on how other platforms handle their moderation elections and found some appealing practices on Wikipedia. We would love to explore in partnership with the community whether we can design elections that allow users to self-appoint at any time and then have their communities determine at that point to embark on an election process. We realize this is a significant departure from the current status quo and thus would love the community input in determining if some variation of this could be incorporated into our next iteration of moderator elections.

Those are the two most important pieces we are looking for, and of course, we have some additional questions we are interested in answering, such as the following:

• Do we need different election types (“regular” vs. “pro-tem”)? Or can we unify it into one election procedure? A quick explainer for those who might not recall. A “regularly” elected moderator is one who ran in a competitive election for a non-beta/”graduated” site, and was made moderator at its conclusion. A “pro-tem” moderator is one who was either elected in a competitive election on a beta site, or appointed in a non-competitive election on a site that hasn’t had a successful “graduation” election (either because it is still a beta site, or because it is not a beta site but hasn’t had a successful “graduation” election).
• Do our current candidate requirements make sense? Or do those need revisiting? Should they differ by site or can they stay uniform, network-wide?
• Participation in moderator elections is declining. Can we reverse that by changing how elections are run?
• Instead of CMs running elections, would it make more sense to create a new role to facilitate them on individual sites?

Non-Goals

These are the things we are deliberately not addressing at this stage. This initiative is specifically intended to look at what we can do to improve the election process; some of the things listed below are items we plan to look at later this year or at other points in the future. We acknowledge that these are important things, but are not a part of our focus at the moment.

• Candidate Score: We know that this is a piece of elections that needs updating, but we would like to have a separate conversation about this later.
• Absentee moderator handling: This process is something we know needs updating, and we hope to do it at some point later this year, we will include the community when we address it.
• Moderator on-boarding: We want to look at this in much more depth later, but to do it justice, it will be handled as its own project.
• Failed Election handling: You may have seen posts on sites that have experienced a failed election. This process could also use some fine-tuning. However, it will be addressed separately in the future.

Next Steps

In the coming weeks, we plan to form a working group of community members to discuss and formalize a new process for handling moderator elections. Once the group has developed a sustainable plan within the bounds of the dev resources we have available for this, we will present it to Meta and test it on a few volunteer sites before rolling it out network-wide for more testing.

If you are interested in participating in the working group, please let us know by filling out the Google Form here. Please fill that out by February 12th, 2024, to be considered. Both moderators and non-moderators are welcome to sign up. The working group will have a chat room that will be in gallery mode so that anyone interested can follow the conversation. We will also have a private team instance to discuss the changes the group would like to see. Those who are invited to participate in the working group will be notified on or about February 13th, 2024.

Please see the schedule below for when we hope to move to each phase of this process. We understand that anyone who wishes to participate will be doing so on a volunteer basis, so these dates are tentative, and we are happy to adjust as needed.

Date	Phase
February 13th, 2024	Working group kickoff
March 18th, 2024	Share election proposal with Meta
March 18th - March 31st, 2024	Iterate on feedback if necessary
~April 4th, 2024	Request for volunteer sites to test new process
~April 30th, 2024	New election testing & feedback with volunteer sites
Mid to late May	MSE update & next steps

We are up for rethinking the whole process and making improvements where possible. Please let us know if you have additional questions or ideas we didn’t address or have concerns about what we have laid out here. This post is an appropriate place to leave feedback or ideas on what you would like to see change, even if you don't plan to join the working group.

We will be considering feedback until February 13th, 2024, when the working group begins its work.

Answer 1

I'm trying to tread a difficult line here where I don't want to undercut what y'all are doing but I also want to ensure that the concerns are fairly laid out. You simultaneously say "we are not trying to sell you on a specific outcome" but then call out a very CM-centric PoV of the problem, outline very specific solutions you'd "love to explore", and mandate specific aspects of elections that are out of scope.

I understand that big changes need community buy-in, so it's important to emphasize how bad things are now and, since y'all are most impacted by the amount of CM work required, it's easy to focus on that aspect of the problem... but in spending so much real estate in the question on explaining how much work it is for y'all, you're distracting from some important concerns that make this more than just "let's reduce election load on CMs so they can work on other stuff".

Some history about recent-ish changes to elections

Elections have been largely unchanged since I've been on SE. What changes have occurred have been primarily focused on the CM process of managing how beta site moderators are selected and when (or if) their tenure ends. While some of these changes were intentionally and deliberately discussed, some of them have (somewhat) silently changed due to the honest reality that CMs couldn't keep up with the work.

In the time I've been around, the following major moderator/election-related discussions or announcements have been shared by staff on MSE:

• Summer 2018 - Experimenting with Pro Tempore elections - Jon Ericson kicked off a test on Parenting to move away from the CM-appointed pro-tempore moderator process to use the existing election UI instead. This became the default process shortly after, with the simplified, non-competitive pro-tem election becoming standard for beta sites.
• August 2019 - Congratulations to our 29 oldest beta sites - They're now no longer beta! - At this point, the policy of running elections when sites leave beta started to shift. While it was the intention to continue this policy, the volume of 29 elections, coupled with some community upheaval, the abrupt loss of 3/7 CMs, and a global pandemic, things started slipping, CMs had to start prioritizing which sites needed elections rather than running full elections by default.
• July 2020 - The new moderator agreement is now live for moderators to accept across the network - the moderator agreement is expanded far beyond the scope it originally served and moderators were expected to accept the changes by re-accepting the agreement or stepping down.
• Spring 2021 - Moderator Elections: tools for Community Managers - The first major overhaul of the actual code that manages elections. It was carried out in several phases (outlined in the linked post) with the primary goal of reducing the manual work required by CMs while also making some general changes to the process. It brought questionnaire responses onto the election page from meta and expanded ranked-choice voting to all candidates rather than the top three.
• December 2021 - Congratulations to the 59 sites that just left Beta - this release from beta added a bunch of new sites to the list of sites needing elections and drastically reduced the number of sites in beta. Despite historical community expectations that leaving beta meant the mods had to stand for election, it would be impossible to run so many elections immediately, even with the recently-overhauled system. In part, there was a question of whether this policy was still necessary since so many of those mods had come through pro-tem elections rather than being appointed by CMs.
• June 2022 - Our site just graduated/launched/left beta! Do we need to do anything? - This answer outlines the most recent policies as they relate to elections on sites leaving beta. It's not a change, per se, but worth including here.

No one could have predicted the size of the network today and, with the company frequently investing in other aspects of the platform, many of the early decisions ossified into what we have today. That said, there are many promises within the election process that engaged community members have come to expect. These are probably the two most important aspects to understand and address before you start discussing how to solve this issue.

What is the purpose of a moderator, really?

I'd argue that, first and foremost, our intention for what a Stack Exchange moderator is and does fails to align with community expectations in most situations. There could be many reasons for this but let's start with the historical purpose of moderators and their toolkits:

If you see anything in the system that is evil, weird, or in any way exceptional and deserving of moderator attention for any reason... flag it! That's the primary job of a moderator: to look at every flagged post, and take action if necessary.

Beyond that, the Theory of Moderation post notably entrusts mods with tools such as:

• Unilateral versions of multi-user curation privileges - closing/migrating, deleting, flagging, tag management.
• Additional moderation tools - post locks, question merging, mod messaging/suspensions
• Data and analytics - High-level vote fraud investigation data, site usage info.
• PII - while couched as "user profile information", moderators have access to much that many other platforms don't grant volunteers.

It additionally advises transparency and communication and indicates that moderators are expected to practice soft skills related to mediation of disputes but simultaneously encourages a judicious hand. Some of the specifics have changed or been added to over time but the core outline is still relatively sound, if somewhat naive.

I personally use a few public service roles to define the types of behaviors I find are expected from moderators:

• Police officer/librarian - someone who understands the community's expectations and works to enforce and adjudicate behavioral and curation norms set by the community in simple cases. Unilateral tools support this role.
• Judge/investigator - In more complex cases, mods are more like a judge or investigator - someone who interprets the rules, seeks to understand the situation fully, and determines consequences in a way that aligns with the community's expectations. User PII, voting histories and mod messaging support this role.
• Politician/thought leader - A third common aspect involves seeing moderators as something more like politicians or thought leaders - expecting them to create policy, rules, and guidance for interpreting and assigning consequences. There really aren't any tools supporting this role.

Nothing says the same person can't fill multiple roles but when it comes to granting access to tools and data, we should consider what roles we are filling with moderators and whether all moderators need access to all stuff.

What expectations do community members have for elections and moderator tenure?

We build processes and tools to meet expectations that users have. In order to create a new process and tools, it's important to understand which expectations exist and how essential people consider them to be. Perhaps the expectations existed in the past but aren't important any longer. Perhaps expectations differ by site or even each user. The question gets at this somewhat in the bullet points above the non-goals section but I think it's worth making more clear and really digging into what users think and what priorities for elections are.

Here are some of the implied expectations I think of when I look at the election system and policies here:

• Moderator positions are granted by community support - currently this is done through an election of one or more people in a ranked-choice contest where only users with a certain amount of site-specific reputation can vote.
• Moderators come from the community - reputation minimums to nominate and the candidate score signal to voters that engaged, active users on that site are higher quality candidates.
• Moderators should be able to focus on moderating once elected - Instead of questioning whether they'll get voted out in the next election or need to spend time away from moderating to campaign, mods generally keep their role for life once elected.
• Communities should not be constantly distracted by elections. - Elections run, at most, for three weeks every six months. It's rare for sites to have more than one election per year.
• Moderators should be currently active - one of the primary exceptions regarding moderator tenure is moderators who vacate their role by being non-responsive to CMs.
• Moderators are volunteers first - mods should feel free to only keep the role when they wish to have it and have the option to leave or go on "vacation".
• Sites should have a limited number of moderators - Adding people to the role of moderator is only done if there's a need for more hands on the site.
• Sites should have more than one moderator - The general policy is that sites should have at least three moderators each. Recently, it has become acceptable to have only two if the site was low-drama.
• Moderators all have the same access & tools (per-site) - Once someone gets a diamond, they have the same access to tools as all other mods on that site, even if they have no intention or need to use them.

What else could go in this list? I'm sure there are other things.

What trappings of the existing election system meet community expectations for moderators? Which don't?

Before we can make informed decisions, we would be well-served to take these expectations, question their purpose, whether the solution we've implemented is doing what we think it does, decide whether we still agree it's important (and to whom), and prioritize them so if we have to choose between them, we know which is more important.

It's reasonable to not want to spend time as part of this project deciding how to revamp every aspect of elections (e.g. candidate score)... but you should question what purpose these aspects are intended to serve and investigate what impact it's actually having so you can determine whether that even needs to exist in the new system.

An example of how questioning the status-quo may lead to novel solutions:

The question states that some sites are struggling to get moderator candidates from their community and there's an issue with elections failing. My understanding is that this can happen even in cases where the site seems to be otherwise healthy - the most relevant expectation above is "moderators come from the community" - Do we (broadly) or the site (specifically) actually want all of a site's mods to be natural, regular users of that site?

Focusing on the more standard sites rather than those with special considerations, what purpose does this restriction serve? I'll allow that right now the only way to see there's flags on a site is to visit the site unless you're staff and can see the all-sites flag dashboard, so a moderator who isn't normally on the site might not notice they need to handle flags there.

What if some of the smaller sites were fine with experienced mods from other sites handling their flags and poking a nose into meta discussions from time to time? What if they actually considered it beneficial to have someone with that expertise, either as a moderator or mentor?

This might open up many options.

• Consider allowing users who are moderators somewhere to run in an election anywhere, regardless of local reputation. Maybe they can only nominate after the election has been extended. Maybe their tenure is temporary or subject to renewal.
• We could consider an option where 6-8 trusted and active mods sign on to moderate a group of sites rather than only moderating their elected site. These sites could opt in if they wanted the extra hands or mentoring from these mods or they may get assigned to it due to inactive mods or insufficient moderator candidates. These mods could have access to a dashboard that shows flag queues and recent meta posts on all sites that are under their care - heck, multi-site mods may benefit from such a page, too.

Maybe these are terrible ideas for some reason or other but we can't even envision them if we don't question the most basic assumptions that make up the status-quo and investigate whether there are other options.

Avoid the pitfall of focusing on reducing CM workload

CMs are important and the time y'all have is limited, so, sure - this is important to you but the company opting to under staff the CM team doesn't seem like a particularly compelling reason for volunteer users to help solve the problem. There are far more urgent and valid reasons - that have been utterly ignored over the last decade - to overhaul elections.

In fact, you've excluded from this discussion the topic that (to my memory) consumed most of the CM time in relation to elections - figuring out what to do when a site's election failed. Have you considered that solving this problem, which could lead to far fewer elections and a higher percentage of successful ones might do a lot to save you time?

I'll admit that part of my reasons for including this section is that I feel your outline of the steps involved in running elections with the current system can lead readers to believe the process is more time-consuming than I ever felt it was - and I normally ran the Stack Overflow elections. The bulk of elections I handled were uneventful and just happened. Once the election was scheduled, I'd say most took less than 20 minutes time over the 3 weeks.

The election steps that involve reaching out to existing mods or drumming up more candidates often take a bit of time, though my impression was that a lot of that is repeating pings and waiting for enough mods to respond to make a decision. Similarly, some sites just have hectic elections that require some extra moderation.

My concern when I see your gravitation to a model that requires less CM involvement is that, while there are active users on sites wondering when the next election is who might love a system more similar to Wikipedia's, most sites don't seem have communities that know or care when they need more moderators and may not have anyone who wants the role. The users most able to determine when more mods are needed and ask for help (the current mods) frequently go silent without contacting anyone about it, so only system notifications draw CM attention to unattended sites. And, honestly, most (by quantity) sites don't need much moderation at all.

---

In conclusion - I understand and appreciate the interest in reworking elections but I'd argue that what you spend the most space on in the question is not the most important argument for this change and that, rather than excluding election-related subjects from this discussion, it's important that any group working on this ask and answer the questions above about the entire scope of the election process, which should help determine what CMs and devs should actually be focusing your efforts on when reworking elections. You may end up exactly where you imagine but you may realize there's much lower-hanging fruit that will lead to better outcomes for users and CMs than you expect.

Answer 2

I wasn't going to comment after I noticed that y'all aren't looking for advice for failed elections (we're already having that conversation on the per-site metas anyway, so I would just be repeating myself). But then I noticed this:

We have done some cursory research on how other platforms handle their moderation elections and found some appealing practices on Wikipedia.

Please, for the love of [deity], do not copy Wikipedia's Requests for Adminship model without a large amount of care and consideration. This is a matter of significant controversy on-wiki, but suffice it to say that (nearly) everybody agrees that RfA is broken, nobody agrees what is wrong with it, the discussion has been going around in circles for years, and meanwhile they are confirming fewer and fewer admins every year* and their attrition numbers are getting a bit scary. This is, to my mind, the epitome of a failed system, and I think it would be much better to try to learn from its failure rather than try to imitate it.

---

* Hyperbole. It's not literally decreasing every year, since there are minor ups and downs, but the long-term trend is downwards. The numbers have gotten so small that minor absolute differences are enough to swing whether it goes up or down in a given year.

Answer 3

Kinda alluded to this in a comment, but I'll reiterate in an answer since comments suck: your process is missing some steps.

You got the mechanics of how elections are coordinated, but... Y'all are community managers: the work of building a team of moderators doesn't start with announcing an election, nor does it end with pushing a button that appoints the winners.

In my experience, it takes years to build up folks to where they're both confident enough to stand in an election and sufficiently skilled to do a good job if elected. Sure, you can just hope that enough confident and skilled folks show up when you hang the sign, but... Uh, maybe you wanna increase your odds just a bit.

In my experience, it's worth looking for folks who have potential well before you have an election. Seek them out, encourage them, chide them, guide them, and then when election time rolls around badger them relentlessly to run. Ok, maybe that last step isn't 100% kosher, but the rest are.

And then once you have folks elected... Get 'em involved! Introduce them to their new comrades, help resolve any friction or confusion, be ready to jump in when they push the wrong button and blow something up. Don't wait for them to fall on their faces and ask for help! This isn't just a great time to help folks learn, it's a great time to learn more about the bits of the system that are ... a little broken, that the old-timers have been working around for so long they don't even think about it anymore.

IOW, y'all need to be building communities that produce and support moderators. Frankly, that's both more important and far more time-consuming than any of the rote tasks you're laying out here.

Answer 4

I think one of the ongoing critiques here is elections are a lot of work. They are — but it's a core community manager function, and having enough staff to handle core community manager functions is essential. Practically most 'cross community/common' tasks ought to be community manager led.

If something is "too much work" for a paid community manager - it seems a little unfair to try to push it to the community without the community initiating it.

---

Do we need different election types (“regular” vs. “pro-tem”)?

Practically they're the same. We used to have pro-tem moderators cause new site moderators were appointed. Now they mostly are not.

While you do re-run an election after graduation, that's a later problem, and part of the graduation lifecycle.

---

Do our current candidate requirements make sense? Or do those need revisiting? Should they differ by site or can they stay uniform, network-wide?

SO suffers from general inflation in reputation and at the very least needs higher thresholds.

I've always thought that the spirit of the rules — that the requirements reflected engagement in that community and a knowledge of systems.

The nice thing about the current system is in theory it's trivially automatable. We used to have a community built app that kept track of candidate score.

I'd almost suggest waiving everything but minimum reputation if a moderator candidate is or was a moderator in good standing, but that's manual work.

---

Participation in moderator elections is declining. Can we reverse that by changing how elections are run?

Elections are 'low' effort to stand in relatively. The commitment comes after. Participation in moderator elections is declining because sites are losing their core members. I think literal volumes have been written over what ails the communities. If you want to sort that out, it might be worth looking at increasing the value the company gives their community. It's not about words, it's about actions. Make the community feel loved and valued over the longer term — and you'll have a chance of reversing this. That's only relevant to the current issue in the sense of "if you're blaming the elections process, you're completely missing what's wrong".

If you have trouble getting people to stand in the elections, what happens when your entire strategy revolves around getting someone willing to run them?

Instead of CMs running elections, would it make more sense to create a new role to facilitate them on individual sites?

Which essentially means finding someone willing to put in 2–3 weeks per site for no real benefit — and for the sake of conflict of interest can't stand in an election.

Which… I suspect is almost as much work as running an election. Considering healthy sites run elections at most annually or more, there's also a risk of last election's community elections co-ordinator dropping out from doing it, or the site as a whole.

Answer 5

One thing the election system needs is a way of voting against someone.

We've all seen it: users who have no business being a moderator nominating themselves, typically because they're hat-collecting or are too new to realize how unqualified they are. Under the current system, it's entirely possible for such a candidate to get elected: for example, two open positions, one qualified candidate, and a half-dozen hat-collectors. If even one of the hat-collectors gets even one vote, the mechanics of the STV system will produce two winners.

Within the mechanics of STV, you could do this by adding a number of "empty seat" candidates; if one of those candidates wins, a moderator position remains vacant. This would require custom counting software to make the "empty seat" candidates equivalent.

Abandoning STV, you could easily get this by adding a quorum requirement, or a "more votes for than against" requirement.

Answer 6

Don't follow Wikipedia too closely

I've been contributing to Wikipedia on and off since 2005. The Request for Admin process there is widely seen as broken. The bar for being accepted as an admin was progressively raised by the community so many times that eventually it became almost impossible for anyone to pass.

See these stats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RFA_by_month

From a distance, the process looks good: anyone can nominate, answer a few questions, and if a high enough ratio of community members vote in favour, they are appointed. What actually happens is that only a small number of people vote at all, and they become increasingly picky about who they vote for, and vote against people for all kinds of pretty trivial reasons.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Series/RfA_reform

Answer 7

This isn't 100% on-topic, but it's related.

Find a way to encourage users to regularly participate in Meta

I'll go out on a limb and suggest that good Moderators begin with regular participation in meta. I can't speak for all Stacks, but over at Worldbuilding we've seen a precipitous drop in Meta participation... and I can point a finger to the decision to discontinue Community Ads.

Community Ads allowed us to direct users to Meta for various purposes. Perhaps chief among them were ads directing new users to our Sandbox where they can test and perfect the process of asking questions, and ads directing experienced users to help mentor in the Sandbox.

That's all been lost. Users who hunt in the Help Center can find the link and I suppose Moderators could hot link the Sandbox in the right column... but in our experience few people read the Help Center until they've had their hand slapped so many times they read it in frustrated rebellion and adding a link to the right column is just another tree lost in a forest.

Is the solution to bring back Community Ads? I wouldn't complain, but no... it's not a panacea. It's merely an example of how we've lost the ability to draw people into the Community discussion rather than using Stack Exchange just to meet their immediate needs.

Conclusion

Yes, we need improvements in the Moderator election process... but we have more fundamental problems, and I believe one of them is the inability to draw users into Meta discussions. Meta experience makes for good Moderators.

Answer 8

Moderators should not be able to effectively "veto" candidates for sites they aren't part of by suspending them on sites they moderate. For example, if the appointed mods here on Meta suspend someone who is a valuable contributor on a different site, that candidate should not be automatically precluded from standing for election on a site they haven't been suspended on. I think this benefits moderators on every site, because they don't have to think about how suspending someone who is disrupting the community they moderate might affect a different community; they can focus on what is best for their community.

If the current site's mod team and community doesn't care about that suspension, they should be able to waive the requirement that a candidate not have been suspended anywhere on the network in the past year. A requirement of nomination should be agreeing that the details of suspensions from the past year can be discussed publicly so the community is making an informed choice.

I don't think the decision of whether a community has the opportunity to vote for a candidate who is in good standing on their site should be up to a member of the CM team who may have a different opinion on the seriousness of things that happened on other sites than the community does. The CM may also not be aware of how the potential candidate's participation on the site they're volunteering to moderate is valued by the community they're asking to serve.

The network has over 182 sites and norms for what merits a suspension can vary widely. Maybe the rule should be changed to disqualify candidates who have had a suspension in the past year on the site that is having the election or on more than one other site on the network. I think one suspension on any site on the network in the past year is just too wide a net and is not indicative of a pattern of bad behavior that should exclude someone as a candidate.

The FAQ There's an election going on. What's happening and how does it work? says

A nominee must be "in good standing". Any nominee who was suspended at any time during the past year on any site in the network will not be allowed to run as a candidate (unless the suspension was in error or was reversed on appeal).

That makes it sound like a site can't just choose ignore a suspension on another site in the network unless that suspension was in error. I think that it's possible for a suspension to be completely justified on one site, and still be irrelevant when determining whether someone would be a good moderator on another site. Because elections are infrequent and need-based, unfortunate timing could exclude otherwise good candidates.

Answer 9

I think that current moderation tools make it impossible for anything but a Community Manager to oversee an election. As a 'simplified' example, when a user accuses a nominee in comments under their nomination of misbehavior (let's say something serious like socks) on another site, and that comment is flagged as harassment and/or because the nominee says the accusation is false, then there is no way for a moderator or community member overseeing an election to check the validity of such flags for themselves. They'd have to either hunt down one of the existing moderators of that other site and hope those read chat messages, and respond in a very timely manner before the whole comment thread becomes a mess and the drama distracts from the election, or ask ... a Community Manager, as those have the tools to check the moderation history of profiles on all sites, but that also only works if there is one available for overseeing the election and this doesn't end up in a backlog of CM escalations.

However, the processes can be streamlined to require a bit less attention. For example, when moderators reach out for an election, they could be asked to already provide some of the information about the workload, how many new team members they'd like, and the urgency. That saves a bit of time for the CM, who doesn't have to find the mods, request this information, and wait for replies. They can just say that 'based on the above, we've scheduled you for date X'.

The shenanigans for question collection could be avoided by avoiding question collection in its entirety. I'm not even sure I'm a fan of this idea, but perhaps it's worth investigating what types of questions the question collection phase yields, and whether those can be condensed into something a bit more generic that can be asked on all sites. Looking just at the latest few SO question collections (2020/2021/2022), there at least seem to be mostly recurring themes in the most upvoted ones, like questions about motivation, what sets you apart from other candidates, and how you would handle different scenarios you might run into as a mod. If a significant part of question collection leads to variants on the same questions, perhaps it's time to just make a bigger questionnaire and/or something that can be automated (like a 'menu' of questions the community can vote for, but no 'other' option, and the software just picks the most votes ones and puts them up).

I'd like to end with a counter-question. You ask: "Participation in moderator elections is declining. Can we reverse that by changing how elections are run?". I will ask: Does anyone already know why participation in elections is declining? I think without the answer to that question, there is no way to know what (if anything) should be changed in how elections are run for participation to increase.

Answer 10

I don't believe it would be that hard to bring fresh blood and greater activity into moderation. It requires the change of but a single rule:

Moderators cannot serve for life

Notably because only moderators can initiate the process of electing moderators, but also because the needs of even moderator lives change, meaning they sometimes drop away from active moderation. Consequently, there should be a period of time after which a moderator must re-justify themselves to the community. For good moderators, this is little more than an inconvenience. But it's a way to ensure fresh blood can enter the moderator circle.

While I think it would be ideal to let communities set their own term lengths, I could easily be convinced that no moderator can serve longer than five (5) years without re-election. And I believe it would be more than reasonable to set the term length to three (3) years.

---

I would like to underscore my primary reason for posting this suggestion

Commenters have read my second suggestion (let communities add more moderators) and jumped to the conclusion that the reason I posted this suggestion was to provide a means of dismissing Mods who, for whatever reason, have become unappreciated or unwanted. It's certainly true that removing the lifetime status of Mods would benefit that problem. However...

As I state in the first sentence, the goal here is to give more people a chance to be Moderators. Such changes bring new ideas, new enthusiasm, and serves to give a greater number of people Moderator experience, which can only be a good thing for any community. It increases the value of the community user base as a whole.

A legitimate argument is that well-trained Moderators (which includes their experience interfacing with Staff) have substantial value. But I counter, is that value so great that it makes the effort of training new Moderators so undesirable that the advancement of community members to Moderator status should be rare? Having never been a Moderator, I can't answer that question.

I do understand that, generally among all Stacks, participation in elections is decreasing. I address that with my third suggestion about finding ways to improve participation in Meta. That problem is reflected all too well in Real Life. When few people are involved in city activities (e.g., volunteering with non-profit organizations or participating in public discussions), they're less likely to vote and unlikely to stand as a candidate at all. I made three suggestions because I think more than one suggestion will be required to solve the problem.

This suggestion focuses on thing: the benefits of rotating elected officials.

Answer 11

Consider running elections with 1 candidate. In that case just make the election a yes-no choice. (This is a more specific special-case of the "empty seat" that @Mark proposes).

I've seen at least a few times (mainly on smaller sites) where one good candidate nominates themselves, but an election isn't able to proceed. What usually happens is that the period is extended, and someone else puts themselves down as a "fake" candidate to offer the illusion of choice (making that explicit in their nomination).

I tend to think this is worse than just proceeding with the election and allowing the users of the site to accept or reject the person who originally nominated themselves.

Edit: Reading the question in more detail, one of the things you're considering is holding elections when users self-nominate. In this case I imagine a choice on an individual candidate would probably be much more common?

Answer 12

Terms

There is a reason why democratic elections held all over the world, usually have a specific time period of power for the elected person.

• It holds the elected person accountable to the community - to some extent.

• It gives the community time to evaluate their elected person's decisions in power and vote accordingly in the future elections.

Vote of no confidence

In the absence of predetermined terms, I believe Motion of no confidence is absolutely essential. In case of complete breakdown of community - moderator relationships, currently the only form of recourse for the community is the CMs, which are highly ineffective. I understand that such votes are held within a legislature. However, a modified form with all voters can be implemented. Similar to Proposal for votes against moderators, a simultaneous vote of no-confidence for current moderators, can be held concurrently with the election for new moderators. Along with electing new moderators, old moderators are put in voting for votes for no-confidence. Any moderator with votes of no confidence of say >35%-50% of total votes on the election, should have their privileges revoken, as the community has no more confidence in the moderators. This is especially needed for "pro-tem" moderators, but would also be useful for "regular" moderators.

Community should have the right to retract/change their original decision.

Answer 13

It’s great to see the discussion here, and that includes the critiques. I want to clarify and address a few things that have been mentioned.

Spencer has pointed out what elections are like on the Community Managers' side because it’s likely that most people will be unfamiliar with what happens on the backend with elections. As Spencer mentioned, the main reason we want to revisit elections is not to take work off of the CMs’ plates and to pass it on elsewhere but to put more ownership over appointing new moderators where it belongs: with the communities.

As Spencer mentioned this is only one slice of what we’re looking to improve over the coming year. We want to look at engagement, elections, moderation, and onboarding - all very holistically - and we want to do it with the community. In the upcoming months, you can look for more posts about initiatives addressing long-standing community concerns and pain points. You’ll see more calls for working groups because we want to involve you more in the decision-making process (again, pushing out ownership to let it sit where it belongs) and incorporate your feedback and ideas earlier and more often. The underlying idea here is to empower the communities in ways that we haven’t been able to before.

Our fiscal year kicks off in April and we’re still in planning mode for the upcoming year. In the next three months, you can expect to see more updates on what the Product and Community teams will be working on. This comes directly from your feedback (and our shared opinion) that you missed the old roadmap posts. We don’t want to simply revert to the old though and just inform you of what we are working on. We want to include you and your voice.

Answer 14

Come on folks. Have some heart. Can we have some compassion on the CM team and their attempts to reduce their workload? Sure, the reasons stated are from the CMs' perspective. But why is someone speaking from their own perspective an inherently bad thing?

Can you lay aside your past grievances for just a moment to look at this more objectively?

Imagine a world where you had goodwill toward SO (the company) and CMs in general, like they were your friends and allies. In that world, you would welcome any opportunity to help them out and make their lives easier.

Lots of discussions on Meta are about the great load and burden that Mods carry on this site, and many requests come in for SO making Mod tools better. Why does it need to be a one-way street? Why can't we (the community) also make CMs' lives easier too? In the end, it will benefit us also, because CMs who are less overworked and less stressed will be freer to think clearly, act kindly under pressure and come up with better and more creative solutions.

If we always wait for SO to start treating us well, then we will never arrive where we want to. Let it start with us, the community. Treat CMs with the compassion and understanding you want to receive from them.

Answer 15

Give the Community the ability to add more moderators

Today only moderators can decide whether or not to increase the number of moderators. The community might disagree and wish to increase the number of moderators — but the community has no recourse if the moderators don't accede to the request.

Give communities a mechanism to invoke a moderator election. It shouldn't be easy or trivial, but it should be possible.