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Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

Comments on Who should the moderators be?

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Who should the moderators be?

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As we have set up communities here on the Codidact network we've been appointing temporary moderators. Usually some people stand out from the proposal process and early activity. Ultimately, of course, we want each community to choose its own moderators; we've been doing this as a stopgap, while communities are forming, so Codidact staff don't have to handle all the flags (some of which we might not understand because y'all are the experts, not us).

The Software Development community is also still forming, but it came about through a different path, through lots of discussions. It didn't have one or two main champions; it was more distributed. And there's been lots of good early activity from several people. So we'd like to ask you who the initial moderators should be.

This community is still small, so we encourage y'all to think of this as temporary -- plan to do something more formal and permanent later, but in the meantime, we need a couple of people who are able to lead this community's early efforts at shaping this community.

What do moderators do? Aside from the community-leadership aspect already mentioned, on Codidact they:

  • handle flags (soon you'll be able to get some help with that, when abilities roll out, but mostly it'll be mods for a while

  • have all the tools -- close/reopen, delete/undelete, locks, user warnings/suspensions when needed (rare we hope), create help topics, and more

  • act as representatives of the community when requesting features from the Codidact team. There are some things, like creating new categories or changing configurable site settings, that require admin access. Mods are the people we want those requests to come from. (If it's something big, we'll ask you to show us community consensus, for example a well-received meta post.)

Moderators do not have access to users' PII. (I don't even have access to users' PII. We try to keep that locked down for everyone's safety.)

Please use answers here for nominations. You can nominate yourself or others -- one candidate per post. If someone nominates you, please edit or comment to indicate whether you'd accept the nomination, and feel free to add anything else about you that the community should know. We'd like to have at least two moderators; a moderator should always have a peer to check with on tricky matters or to defer to where there's conflict of interest.


Update: We have appointed two moderators, Alexei and ShowMeBillyJo. This addresses the immediate need; we can add another if the community wants, but we can also wait. These are temporary appointments, until the community is larger and more established. Ultimately we want communities to choose their own moderators.

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1 comment thread

General comments (14 comments)
General comments
Lundin‭ wrote over 3 years ago

The complete lack of response might indicate that it's a good idea to assign (temporary) moderators and coming up with a site scope before launching a new community. Seems we have neither. What should the moderators do other than enforcing CoC? This site has been floating around here for many months now, but we still have no clue for what's on-topic/off-topic. It can't be the moderators' responsibility to come up with that - it should be done by the community before site launch.

Lundin‭ wrote over 3 years ago · edited over 3 years ago

Scope is of course subject to change as the site matures, but there needs to be some foundation upon site launch. Instead of "lets release a random programming site and see what happens". As it stands, everyone seems to have some vague, personal opinion of what the site is about.

Lundin‭ wrote over 3 years ago · edited over 3 years ago

I made some attempts to gather consensus about this once the site was launched, but there was neither consensus nor enough interest. And if there isn't even enough interest to come up with a site scope, well then perhaps there wasn't enough interest to launch the site-about-something to begin with. There must be a core of dedicated users to push through scope, rules, site usage policies etc.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote over 3 years ago

I think the body of questions that's developing, including which ones get closed, will help inform scope.

r~~‭ wrote over 3 years ago

I don't know if I'm quite agreeing with Lundin—I think it's perfectly legitimate to start holding meetings of the Whale Watching Club before there is a written charter detailing what will take place in meetings of the Whale Watching Club—but I do think that answering every meta question with ‘whatever the community wants’ presents challenges specifically for community formation, and this is a manifestation of that. Abstractions can generate interest, but you need specifics to get commitment.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote over 3 years ago

That's fair @r~~. This community came about a little differently from the others; there were lots of general requests for a software site but we didn't have a cohesive community. Now that we're here and have some participants and some questions getting answers, how should we proceed to best move forward?

r~~‭ wrote over 3 years ago

IMHO, do what you describe for other Codidacts and choose (or at least nominate?) temporary mods yourselves, based on early activity and/or evidence that they demonstrate what you see as the spirit of Codidact.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote over 3 years ago

I've made a couple nominations to get the ball rolling. I hope to see more.

Lundin‭ wrote over 3 years ago

@‭r~~‭ The problem is rather that you get all manner of whale enthusiasts joining too - marine biologists, anti-whaling enthusiasts, whale hunters and a couple of bird watchers. If the bird watchers are numerous and loud enough, then that's what you'll end up with instead.

Lundin‭ wrote over 3 years ago

I would have preferred site proposition -> scope -> posting rules -> temporary moderator nominations -> launch, so that we had a chance to truly make something better than SO. Now, it is very far from what was discussed on the old forums last winter. It is what it is.

Alexei‭ wrote over 3 years ago

@Lundin While I cannot find right now a clear scope for Software Developement, your suggestion from here (https://meta.codidact.com/questions/74893#answer-276171) is a very good start.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote over 3 years ago

I agree; that list from the proposal is a great starting point. (Upvoted it back then, still support it.)

Lundin‭ wrote over 3 years ago

@Alexei‭ That was a proposal for a Software Engineering site similar to the one on Stack Ex. Notably, it lists "Implementing, trouble-shooting or explaining specific code" as off-topic, because that would make the scope too dang huge. Now the current site here is both the "Software Engineering" and regular programming Q&A, and a bunch of other things as well.

Moshi‭ wrote over 3 years ago

I noticed that we've got two mods now, does this mean that the mod nominations are closed?