2021 Moderator Election

nomination began
Oct 25, 2021 at 20:00
election began
Nov 8, 2021 at 20:00
election ended
Nov 16, 2021 at 20:00
candidates
3
positions
1

On Stack Exchange, we believe the core moderators should come from the community, and be elected by the community itself through popular vote. We hold regular elections to determine who these community moderators will be.

Community moderators are accorded the highest level of privilege on our community, and should themselves be exemplars of positive behavior and leaders within the community.

Our general criteria for moderators is as follows:

  • patient and fair
  • leads by example
  • shows respect for their fellow community members in their actions and words
  • open to some light but firm moderation to keep the community on track and resolve (hopefully) uncommon disputes and exceptions

Every election has three phases:

  1. Nomination
  2. Primary
  3. Election

Please participate in the moderator elections by voting, and perhaps even by nominating yourself to be a community moderator!

Additional Links

Questionnaire
The community team has compiled questions from meta for the candidates to answer.
  1. How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?

[Answer 1 here]

  1. How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc. a question that you feel shouldn’t have been?

[Answer 2 here]

  1. In your opinion, what do moderators do?

[Answer 3 here]

  1. A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?

[Answer 4 here]

  1. In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?

[Answer 5 here]

Zac67

Hello all,

likely you know me already - I'm Zac67 and I've been participating here on Network Engineering for a good four years, and on a few other SX sites as well. I think it's time to step up as a moderator now. I'm visiting and participating on a very regular basis and I've already been trying to guide new members (or not-so-new ones) to provide good and valuable questions and answers.

I think we could improve our "onboarding process" to make clearer what NE is about and especially what it isn't about, considering the amount of off-topic, closed questions from newbies. Of course, that's a delicate topic as we can't really afford to scare off new recruits, and I'd like to continue working on it.

Questionnaire
  1. How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?

Generally, short discussions are healthy for refining and improving our Q&A database. If these discussions get out of hand for the current question/topic they should be guided to our chat rooms, as is already being practiced. But I think that's a case-by-case decision, there's no general rule.

  1. How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc. a question that you feel shouldn’t have been?

I'd leave a comment why I think the question should be reopened and would leave it to the community to decide. I'd only reopen a question directly if it's very obviously been closed by mistake.

  1. In your opinion, what do moderators do?

Most of the time, they're normal users. It's only when there's a direct need to intervene - spam, inappropriate content/links, users being rude, or perhaps blatantly off-topic questions that a moderator really needs to moderate.

  1. A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?

That comes with the responsibilty, no problem. ;-)

  1. In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?

Hmm. Can't really say that it'll make me more effective, but perhaps it might increase overall efficiency when a bit less review is required.

I think our community could use some updating, and that will be easier with more moderators who are regularly active and participating in community development.

I want to expand the scope of on-topic questions to include network automation tools & methods, such as ansible & Python (when narrowly-focused on networking.)

I want our community to welcome more professional network engineering questions, while continuing to avoid home/consumer-level items better addressed on other SX sections.

I wish also to advocate for Stack Exchange, the mothership, to add support for MermaidJS diagrams to its Markdown dialect.

Questionnaire
  1. How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?

I support the community's current practice of occasionally removing comments and replacing them with a suggestion to use the chat feature for extended discussion, off-topic items, etc.

  1. How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc. a question that you feel shouldn’t have been?

This is really the only reason I would want to be moderator -- to expand the scope of what's on-topic, and make our SX community more valuable.

I believe the discussions in our meta about doing that are constructive, and don't often see votes to close questions that don't fall within our rules.

I will read up on Stack Exchange's best practices for resolving disagreements about what is on-topic. I'll also work to clarify the community rules for question scope to address the larger issue of what we really want.

  1. In your opinion, what do moderators do?

Network Engineering mods should facilitate constructive Q&A within the documented scope of this community.

  1. A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?

I'm reluctant to nominate myself for this and would prefer there wasn't a status symbol associated with the Q&A content I contribute.

However, I see there are no other nominees for the open position, and I really would like to expand our scope to include more network automation content. Our profession is changing and we should embrace that evolution.

  1. In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?

I don't think it's about making me more effective, but about updating the community scope to keep up with the change in our profession.

Lucas Kauffman

I've been involved in Stackexchange for over 10 years now. I've recently started to look more into networking again, so being active on this site helps me keep current.

I want to help grow the community as a whole and figure out what our direction should we and how we can further generate a larger user-base as to get more, qualitative questions with regard to networking - with more focus on professional problems rather than home based issues.

Questionnaire
  1. How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?

would first want to review the different comments and see whether there is a trend in how the person is providing their comments. If there is a legitimate problem, I would probably reach out to the person directly and review and explain why their comments may not meet community guidelines and get/provide feedback from the person on how they may improve their commenting behavior.

  1. How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc. a question that you feel shouldn’t have been?

Reach out to the moderator to review why they went down that course of thought and discuss whether it should be re-opened. If we still disagree - probably would bring it to Meta and get feedback from the community.

  1. In your opinion, what do moderators do?

I think it's a combination of quality assurance on the questions and answers, addressing community concerns and figuring out ways to increase the overall user-base overtime. To increase the user-base I believe we need to listen to the users and review how we go about moderating the Q&A, what is the scope of our site and understand what engages or disengages them from Networking.SE.

We are not here to 'police' the website - rather ensure that the site meets our community standards - which are ultimately set, decided and changed by our community.

  1. A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?

Should be fine!

  1. In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?

I'm not an expert in networking, for me to be able to contribute this provides an earlier path rather than trying to scrape my way to 10 or 20k rep.

This election is over.