This document was created by the @forums-governance team as a result of the identified need of providing transparency and clarity on how decisions around the selection of moderators are made.
It aims to summarize the process and requirements for the community to suggest and validate new moderators on these forums.
This is version 1.1. It was approved on 2023-11-30.
Note: The intention is to come up with good-enough guidelines that have general consensus and that are expected to keep improving over time.
OSM Forums - Moderator selection criteria
Requirements
In order for a person to be a forum or category moderator, they would need to fulfill the following requirements:
- Actively contributing in the community conversations at least in the last 6 months.
- No active bans or sanctions because of past misbehavior or abuse.
- Good record of being exemplary, treating others with kindness.
- Disclosure of relevant affiliations and willingness to follow the OSMF WG Conflict of Interest Policy
- Commitment to fulfill the role responsibilities (see below)
On-boarding and responsibilities
By putting themselves forward for a category moderator position, candidates commit to:
- Proactive Moderation: Stay active and regularly monitor conversations and community flags.
- Incident Response: Follow and enforce the category and forum etiquette guidelines.
They will be provided with detailed moderator guidelines with clear examples on how to deal with common tasks and recommendations for difficult situations. The rest of the moderators will help on-board new members and will provide peer-support.
The primary responsibility of site moderators is to implement sanctions that require higher account privileges, which they would do upon request by category moderators. Site moderators should generally not exercise their elevated privileges on their own initiative or within a category they moderate as category moderators. However, site moderators can act as a backup if a category moderator team is falling behind on handling flags.
New moderators process for new categories
Please note the requirements above before suggesting a new moderator.
Communities and users can suggest new moderators by opening a new topic in the āNew category requestā category. Candidates suggested will need to reply on the topic sharing that they are OK being candidates.
The proposed moderator team as a whole will be confirmed by a discussion and poll as described below.
Approved moderators will be added to the corresponding groups by the forum governance team.
Applications for site moderator status
Any user who is already moderator in at least one category is eligible to (additionally) become a site moderator. They can volunteer for the role at any time and are confirmed individually through a discussion and poll as described below.
Health-checks
At any time
If any moderator stops fulfilling any of the points in the requirements list at any time, anyone can flag it privately to the @forums-governance team. The team may respond by removing the userās moderator status.
Yearly
Once a year, communities will be encouraged to check on their current moderatorsā status, open for public comments for 7 days. New mods needed, or rotation on the ones no longer fulfilling requirements can be communicated as a new topic here.
In case of conflict
In cases where the evaluation of requirements fulfillment turn not to be obvious, the forums governance team will use a poll with the community to decide whether to grant/revoke moderator status.
Polls
Polls are used during category creation, during applications for site moderator status, and sometimes during health checks.
They are preceded by a community discussion which is open for at least 5 days (always including weekend days), allowing anyone in the community to share their thoughts and additional suggestions.
After these 5 days, a public forum poll will be called to (Approve, Reject) the candidate or list of candidates.
The poll will be open for another 5 days (always including weekend days), and it will be approved with least 80% of āYesā votes.
Voters are encouraged to comment on the topic explaining the reasons for their votes.
Special note on existing moderators
Since some category moderators have been added before this new process was in place, we will be running a āNew moderators process for new categoriesā (described above) in 3 monthsā time (December 10th) to re-validate their roles.