Moderators for the global categories

Tordanik · 2022-11-17T17:02:20.141Z

The @forums-governance-team has come up with a plan for increasing the number of moderators for the international categories. The lack of such moderators occasionally results in long response times to flagged posts. We also want to be more alert about conflicts of interests (incorporating feedback from the community and the board) and a larger team of moderators with different backgrounds will make that easier as well.

To form a decently-sized moderator team to start with, we would like to offer a moderator role to people who already had a similar role on the existing platforms. That is:

the talk and osmf-talk list moderator team for #general and #osmf
moderators from help.osm.org for #help-and-support
possibly admins and international mods from forum.osm.org as additional mods for #general

After a year, we would like to validate that the community is still happy with these moderators through a poll as described in the Moderator selection criteria. By then, we hope that migration of even those platforms further down on our to-do list (such as some of the mailing lists) may be complete.

In addition to this initial team, further moderators can be selected using the process outlined in the Moderator selection criteria.

adreamy · 2022-11-18T02:36:12.626Z

That’s good news and it’s the right thing to do.

I have a person I would like to recommend. Should I recommend it here, or ask that person to express their intention to this article?

Martin_Borsje · 2022-11-18T08:19:41.141Z

No problem for me to volunteer: Netherlands moderator now; reads Dutch, English, German, French.

dieterdreist · 2022-11-18T11:49:28.000Z

This is good news. Have you been thinking about limiting the maximum members from the same entities, e.g. companies? It would be desirable if by design no company could have a majority within the international moderation team.

Tordanik · 2022-11-21T16:06:44.652Z

adreamy:

I have a person I would like to recommend. Should I recommend it here, or ask that person to express their intention to this article?

I expect we’ll do an explicit call for volunteers. Our first step is to directly approach the moderators of the existing platforms, though.

dieterdreist:

Have you been thinking about limiting the maximum members from the same entities, e.g. companies?

No, this is not something we’ve discussed so far.

Personally, I hope this kind of quota system is unnecessary. While it would certainly be a sign of some kind of imbalance in the system if most moderators were part of the same organization, this outcome can be prevented through the poll mechanism – that is, don’t vote for a moderator team that you do not consider trustworthy. What could be helpful, though, would be a requirement to disclose relevant affiliations (similar to the expectations for working group members).

Matija_Nalis · 2022-12-13T21:38:58.397Z

Tordanik:

What could be helpful, though, would be a requirement to disclose relevant affiliations (similar to the expectations for working group members ).

I would absolutely agree that moderators should be required to disclose their affiliations. I see only positive things coming from such transparency. Related recent discussion, and another one.

Martin_Borsje · 2022-12-14T09:12:01.953Z

I would suggest that a member of the international moderator team is not affiliated to any company that could have any relation or possible conflict of interesr with OSM.

Matija_Nalis · 2022-12-14T23:24:58.911Z

Martin_Borsje:

member of the international moderator team is not affiliated to any company that could have any relation [or …] with OSM

I’m certainly no fan of big corporate interests in OSM, but I’m not quite sure how much open-endedness in this you wanted to convey here?

As stated, I’d read that first “or” condition to mean (for example) that any associate OSMF member is not eligible to be on a international moderator team.

(as they are affiliated with OSMF company which has some relation to OSM). Is that the intention, or have I misunderstood? And if I misunderstood, could you clarify in more details what exactly would you propose?)