Moderator selection criteria

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.

That’s out of the scope for this forum’s moderators.

I understand the feeling of not wanting additional bureaucracy on a project you contribute to when we have to deal with that in our day to day life, but experience and research has proven again and again that the lack of structure in open source often leads to informal power positions and abuse of power.

The problem being solved here is accountability, power distribution and leadership renewal for a position that has additional privileges/power in its nature (being a moderator).

  • In terms of accountability, the intention is that mods are accountable to the community they are serving.
  • In terms of power distribution, that’s why at least 3 people is asked to be part of the category mods, and encouraging to have more if desired.
  • In terms of renewal (to avoid people taking their role for granted forever), a mechanism to review and re-validate the roles by the communities themselves is needed.

Having a yearly conversation within the community about how they feel about their mods, thinking about adding more people to distribute power and re-validate the role (in this case via voting) is one of the potential solutions. In my opinion doing this once a year doesn’t sound too heavy, I might be wrong.

The good thing is that whatever is decided, it can be tried, evaluated and then decide if it works or needs to be updated, this criteria is expected to keep evolving over time.

Having said that, probably there are other solutions that solve the same problems I’ve described above, that’s why we have this as a proposal for discussion, to co-create this criteria :slight_smile:

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I would limit consideration to OSM channels. In my opinion, a high activity score on, say, Twitter or Facebook, combined to near absence on the combination of our mailing lists, fora, wiki, and this community should not be mistaken for a high committment to community forming.
My opinion, based on observations, trying to make it generically applicable.

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you already have a link to such guidelines? then we know if any of us wishes to apply for the task, and for the rest of us to know what to expect from our moderators.

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I have a tendency to believe this. But when we speak about informal power positions a lot of positions in OSM comes to my mind. None of them being a moderator of wiki, mailing list or forum.

This is the reason I was asking whether I did nmiss some point in what special powers a moderator is supposed to have.

A forum moderator can not decide about how the OSM website should look like or what is supposed to be displayed there. This is the decision of a few people who just happened to volunteer many years ago. There is no formal process on deciding which presets are getting added in editors or more important which are not. But these positions are strong gatekeepers of the mapping scheme in OSM. A forum moderator is also not involved in deciding which features are displayed on the map which is displayed by default when opening the osm website and for many representing OSM.

So yes, informal power roles might be a problem. But you are talking about a forum moderator role. This seems to be like you identify a problem and then tackle something else just as the initial problem sounded too complex.

And are you certain that this approach will attract the right people for moderation? Or will it attract the “loudest”, maybe looking for a way to pimp their résumé because they seek work in the OSM field?

On the other hand, maybe that doesn’t matter. I still believe that a forum moderator has no special say in a community in the sense of leadership. Their task is to moderate a forum.

But then again the outlined process is way to complicated. A yearly mail with something like “the following people are moderators of this forum. Are you happy with their work? Would you like to change something? Could you consider also to do this task?” would do it as well. No need for poll, checking for fake account in polls and so on…

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Structures and bureaucracy also repeatedly resulted in abuse of power. Sadly the problem is not just lack of structure and just adding more formalism should not be expected to solve it entirely.

The problem is that people are not ideal and any power can be abused, and there is no silver bullet. And formalism has own issues. For example codes of conduct are not magical power stopping abusive people - and abusers can use also CoC as a tool.

Though yes, smart structures can be better than informal soup.

Someone able to delete posts and ban people is definitely position of power. Very minor one but it is something.

I have been participating in another Discourse forum started shortly before this forum and it has encountered some issues surrounding moderation. There was not a formal process to select moderators. But on that forum the moderators do participate much more such as by adding tags to topics. For example right now there is no wiki category. If there is a topic about a wiki, a moderator should be able to go in and add the wiki tag or move the post to the correct category. I would suggest creating a moderator duties description that clearly states what powers a moderator does have. Clearly something like banning a user should not be done by a single moderator. Discourse does have ways of flagging and hiding posts that do not necessarily delete the post. Documenting the processes surrounding moderation and being open in that sense is just as, if not more important than the selection of moderators themselves.

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Yes, I tend to believe that a simpler process might be possible and that anyone fulfilling the requirements should be able to help as moderator.

Let’s think about your proposal, how would you handle if there are different opinions and there is no consensus? Who would be the ultimate decision maker here?

Note that the current proposal is trying to optimize for communities self-accountability.

They are expected to mediate in conflict, enforce the guidelines and the have the decision making power to hide, move or delete messages if needed.

This requires leadership and community trust in my opinion, and building a process to ensure the problems I described above are tackled is complex. Most probably the first version of this criteria won’t be perfect and will require future tweaks.

The main question is about how to resolve conflicts in case some potentially single community members are not happy with moderation style. And I can imagine that in some cases two conflicting opinions collide and a moderator falls out of role and hides messages or potentially edits them to please better.

So question now is: Do you want to allow allow anonymous complaints or do you require that a member more or less publicly has to state this?

I think a way out of this is to have a second level of moderation, which would in these hopefully rare cases moderate the moderator. This could be a reminder to not take position when speaking as a moderator or clearly differentiating in which situation something is stated as moderator and when it is as regular member up to actually revoking status.

In this scenario a member could report to that second level that they believe the moderator is overstepping. That 2nd level moderators (like super-moderators) could then revoke moderator status (at least temporarily) from that member and ask community for suggestions on moderator. Maybe even allowing the community to keep the moderator in question.

Reporting to super-moderators would only expose the identity if the reporter towards the super moderators. So in case of minor issues the potentially already existing conflict between two members is not additionally fueled and allowed to cool down.

These specific 2nd level moderators, by having the power to promote members to moderators and revoke moderator status have then significantly more power. For these you might run elections.

This would then also allow to separate these roles from technical administration of the forum. It might be the same people if elected, but could also differ.

A group of maybe 5 super-moderators could then vote with a majority decision and start the community process of moderator approval.

This would bring the administrative overhead from 5ß-60 polls each year down to these 5 and potentially another one in case a moderator did overstep. Still uncertain whether this actually ever happened since we run the forum.

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If a moderator is being abusive it can be reported with the current proposal:

This second layer of governance is something we have already with the Forum Governance Team, which by the way I remind that we keep looking for feedback on how to improve, ensure true diversity and leadership rotation.

I think then everything is in place already to deal with moderators abusing power.
No overhead for polls needed.

You might think about splitting technical administration and governance. It looks like this is the same role currently.

Well, only one member of the current forums governance team is actually in charge of the technical side of the forum :slight_smile:

Ideally, such guidelines should be tailored to our specific community dynamics, and such a custom document hasn’t been created yet. But some parts of the generic Discourse moderation guide are applicable to our forum as well.

I would like to keep things simpel. I do not think that an “evolution Poll” each year is meaningful.

I think its good enough that 10 members of a community (or 1%) can står such a poll and mabvy we can have a yearly reminder Post.

I do not like the idear of moderators seeing their role.for a limited amount of time. It should clear that a good moderator that has in mind to quit should look out for people to “grow in that role” including “alongside work”.

Theierfor i dislike the idear of having a moderator with an evaluation process like a “board member”. It is not nesseary to request än officiell title - but it is nesseary to have a metod for conflict handling.

The need to stop a moderator with democracy in special situations does not mean that it has to be complecated to became a moderator.

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I just learned that the probably “typical” moderator in the community, a “category moderator”, won’t have special powers to delete or silence other users. Actually the only “special” power as opposed to a TL4 level which can also be reached by power users is to review posts and flags.
This does not really justify all the proposed overhead of polling.

We should focus more on encouraging regular users of the forum which demonstrated communication skills in terms of mediating between conflicts and such to get involved into moderation, instead of thinking about rules to protect from a not existing thread.