2019 Community Moderator Election

Question

The 2019 Community Moderator Election is now underway!

Community moderator elections have three phases:

1. Nomination phase
2. Primary phase
3. Election phase

Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends on how many candidates there are.

Please visit the official election page at

https://physics.stackexchange.com/election

for more detail, and to participate!

If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged election.

Answer 1

I suspect there may be a lot of people self-selecting themselves out of running because they think that they don't quite have enough experience with the community moderation ─ in a large cohort of users that I think are perfectly qualified. I, for one, feel that there are a lot of users in, say, the 5k - 15k rep bracket, and with, say, about one to three years of experience on the site, who would be excellent moderators.

Please don't leave the community moderation to the same old faces! There's a lot of highly opinionated users who are very visible on meta and other community-moderation mechanisms (cough), but I would bet that there's a substantial fraction of our experienced user base (where by "experienced" I mean roughly "has had 3k+ and been reasonably active on the Close queue for longer than a year") who would offer extremely valuable perspectives that would do a lot of good in broadening how the broader site community is represented in the day-to-day moderation.

If you feel that you have a good grasp on how the site moderation works, then please consider running!

Answer 2

Your Phys.SE community needs you.

Answer 3

Does anybody get the impression that our questionnaire might be turning people away? I can think of a couple of users with ~10k rep who are reasonably active in review queues (and general close voting), post editing, and duplicate votes, but have no/very little meta and chat presence. However, we have three questions (questions 3, 8, and 10 in the questionnaire) which are about these matters: two are about well- and poorly-recieved meta posts, while the other is about chat (and two of those three questions were my suggestions, but whatever). If someone feels that they won't be able to put together significant answers for three out of ten questions, they may be considering themselves bad fits for the position.

I personally feel that these people would make fine moderators: if they're participating in reviews, they probably have a good enough idea of the policies regarding the scope, so they'll be able to help meta discussions once they're moderators. And some of our present moderators are not very active on chat: some pop in occasionally to make sure that things are going smoothly, and some are barely ever in the room.

If this is the case, is there a way to somehow tell people that it's possible to be a competitive candidate with 'null' answers for those questions, as long as they can show their contributions in some other way?

Answer 4

Can someone clarify why this election is being held? Is it something that happens automatically every so often, or did the existing moderators request it (either because they feel swamped or for some other reason?