- Many communities are local/national, with members not necessarily speaking English, and not reading anything outside the community. I think this calls for running discussions, votes and healthchecks within the community category, not in the “New category request” category. And in local language.
- Why, when proposing a new moderator, the poll is on the list of moderators? Wouldn’t it be better if the vote was for every proposed moderator separately?
- I don’t know the other communities, but it’s quite common in old Polish forum that people read it once a week. I would suggest extending the time for discussion and polls up to two weeks.
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Nevertheless 80% is high. This means four times more people accepting the moderator and caring to vote than people that don’t want this particular moderator for any reason. This may result in leaving a community without a moderator, come some trolls.
And oh, I have seen trolls…
We could simply stand at standard 50%+1 vote or I can come up with some more or less complicated formula to make it hard to go below some preferred number of moderators for a community.
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I think the most important thing is that moderators overstepping their
mandate can be recalled quickly and easily enough. It is ok for me if a
moderator only has 51% support when starting their work, but if at any
later time more than 20% of participants are unhappy with the
moderator’s work they need to go. There will always be some people
unhappy with a moderator (including the trolls of which you speak) but
if 20% are unhappy then the moderator is not the right person for the job…
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Sure. Provided that we are talking about 20% of all the community members, not 20% of people who took part in the poll. Because otherwise people not caring to vote will make removing any moderator possible.
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Thanks for the feedback @rmikke
Yes, it should be clarified. A mechanism to coordinate all categories to open the evaluation period at the same time (and maybe sharing a tag for visibility) might be needed I guess.
That possibility was considered when the proposal was drafted, but that introduces a few additional issues:
- Additional complexity in the voting mechanism and how that’s counted.
- Adds a “popularity contest” factor that’s known to penalize emerging leadership in open source communities.
- Adds a personal evaluation factor that penalizes people down-voted, which for some people/personality types is a moral mining issue.
- Removes the incentive for the community to discuss and come first with an agreed list of people and delegates that to a simple voting without much need of prior discussion.
For those reasons, it was unclear what the benefit of individual voting was introducing vs the potential negative factors that have been observed in other communities using this method.
I don’t have a strong opinion here, having categories agreeing and having their moderators approved in 10 days looked reasonable to avoid much delay on getting initially the categories up and running. Not sure what’s the right balance here.
I don’t understand. What is more complex in two polls for two moderators, than one?
And the more moderators are on the list, the more probable it is that anyone who dislikes one proposed moderator will vote against the list and in effect the vote will be negative for the whole list.
Nope. We are not talking alternatives here. It’s not “choose one of”, it’s yes or no for every proposed moderator. They may all pass. I can’t any contest here, no popularity contest in particular.
Yeah, that’s kind of valid point.
Well, if the community came up with an agreed list of people, no poll would be needed at all, would it?
But it would some active group that prepares a list and they would keep hold on the community governance. There are advantages to it, as there would rather not be grudges between moderators from one group, but OTOH community members outside this group may feel underrepresented or manipulated.
Also kind of valid point. Maybe those periods should be shorter when setting up a community. But for established (and larger) communities there is no rush, the community is working anyway and there should be time for less frequent members to react.
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Shouldn’t it be anonymous?
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To avoid abuses, trolls and puppet-accounts, the poll is proposed to be public, but feel free to disagree and share if you have flags about it.
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There are advantages to both anonymous and non-anonymous votings. As the moderators don’t have many ways to prosecute people for their voting, I think anonymous voting is not needed.
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What about situations with a group of trolls (it’s common), who during a specific period occupy the conversation and this space, resulting in the desertion of other members? These people would vote for another kind of moderator. Is that an organic evolution we want to allow?
Many people, in a same community, won’t vote if it’s not anonymous, because they won’t want to create friction. Typical behaviour in Latam.
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I don’t have the solution but I really think it could be uncomfortable for many people to vote his way.
That is also true @mapeadora
If anonymous the community won’t have the ability to audit if something weird has happened (like trolls and puppet-accounts).
But I understand some people don’t want to be exposed of voting no to a proposal.
That’s one of the reasons the voting is to the lists created by the community discussion, not individuals.
But maybe there is a middle-ground where both things can be solved. Ideas?
(Note that the poll/voting proposal was to incorporate a mechanisms where the communities themselves can oversee and validate their proposals, which I also understand is complex in an environment where most communities don’t have a formalized chapter or members list.)
Well, it’s typcal for every community where the government abuses or used to abuse it’s position. We have it in Eastern Europe as well.
But I guess if public voting works for wiki , why wouldn’t it work here?
Am I missing something here? Are the roles and responsibilities of a moderator changed?
Or was our small local community just an exceptionally friendly place?
In the past moderation in the forum was mainly about cleaning up the forum from spam, approving posts from new users adding a link and such. And rarely it did require a hint to other members to stay polite and friendly in a discussion or avoid getting off-topic.
The process outlined here is more valid for some sort of “official representative” of a community with some governance power. Will the “Moderator” now be having a special role? Will a moderator now be like a court to rule decisions on mapping disputes or similar? Is it planned to migrate DWG tasks over towards moderators here? Otherwise all that yearly voting process sounds a bit over-the-top for what a moderator tasks are.
Why not simply ask for endorsement by the community to establish a new moderator? And if a moderator is abusing the given power, a poll can be held anyway. But why doing such complicated stull like yearly elections? We speak about the janitor of the community, not the mayor.
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In my experience the DWG have never had any involvement in moderating forums (or for that matter mailing lists). There have always been forum and mailing list moderators for that. I suspect that over the years a number of DWG members might have had moderator roles in local fora (as well as other OSM responsibilities, like being board members etc.), but that’s always been separate.
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That is also an option on the current PL forums it seemed to work well, there are no yearly reelections for OSM Wiki sysops.
Personally, I can see why yearly elections feel too heavy for the position. And it’s clear how adding moderators could easily work without any such schedule. However, I don’t have a good idea for how to trigger polls to re-validate moderators. Doing a poll every time at least 1 person complains that some moderator is abusing their power doesn’t seem sensible, but what else would be a good way to ensure that a poll is started when it is needed?
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The question on how to deal with members abusing their powers given by role is a generic one. How to deal with a wiki admin reverting or blocking unwanted opinions or people?
How to do the same with mailing list moderators? Or even DWG members?
I guess the number of cases where this happens is relatively small. Can we get some numbers on how often this happened in the last five years?
Assuming a very low number, i propose to have the OSMF board as the authority running the services to act here as a point where membership can report suspicion that some are abusing their powers. This also avoids that someone has to get in direct contact with moderator team exposing a conflict. In case of simple mis-understandings this will avoid bad blood feelings in a local community.
In case of severe mistakes by moderators a community poll can be held regarding stripping a member of moderator power.