Every site needs people to handle moderation duties. While most of this can be done by folks using the site, there are a few tasks that require special privileges:
Even with active community self-regulation, moderators occasionally need to intervene. Moderators are human exception handlers, there to deal with those (hopefully rare) exceptional conditions that should not normally happen, but when they do, they can bring your entire community to a screaming halt — if you don’t have human exception handling in place.
Initially, we (employees of Stack Exchange) act as moderators on a site. But a few weeks after a site enters public beta, we start looking for folks who would make good moderators and contacting them to see if they're willing to be Moderators Pro Tempore until the site has grown enough to allow for elections.
"Who should our moderators be" is one of the 7 essential questions we encourage every community to ask themselves, so usually this process is kicked off by the community around the end of the private beta. That doesn't seem to be the case this time, so I'm here to solicit nominations.
Here's what we're looking for in a moderator:
- Have a reasonably high reputation score to indicate active, consistent participation.
- Have sole control of the account (i.e. accounts used by multiple people aren't eligible).
- Show an interest in their meta's community-building activities.
- Lead by example, showing patience and respect for their fellow community members in everything they write.
- Exhibit those intangible traits discussed in A Theory of Moderation.
If you're interested and qualified, volunteer here by posting an answer. If you know someone who would make a good moderator, nominate them.
- Each nomination should be posted as an answer and it should include (at minimum) a link to the user's main and meta profile so we can check out their activity.
- Self nominations are encouraged.
- If you are nominated by someone else you should edit the answer and let us know if you accept or decline (explanation optional). If a nominee declines we will not delete the answer, as to not have someone else nominate them again.
- If you are nominating someone else, please mark the post as Community Wiki before saving. Meta doesn't allow suggested edits, so your nominee may be blocked from accepting the nomination.
- The nominations are not binding. If you are being considered by Stack Exchange, we will contact you by email and you will get an official confirmation at one point.
I'll give this post a few days, and then will approach some or all of the volunteers to see about forming the initial moderator team for this site.
