"Prerequisites for being a moderator"
* Age requirements * Time availability It also mentions requiring previous experience as a forum moderator (on an external forum I suppose?) I take it you expect there's going to be plenty enough people with past experience?
Well, there always has been enough people with past experience. We're kind of in a new world, with the old forum members not wanting to participate. It would be so very time intensive to teach someone who has never moderated before. But it might become necessary. It's a bridge we'll have to cross if we come to it.
I'm not sure how we could fact check an age requirement for moderators. I see the requirement for experience as a much stronger indication of maturity than age. But if there's some legal reason for it, we could mention age. No problem mentioning the time. It's mostly as much time as the volunteer has to offer, but I can come up with an estimate.
"Moderator Duties and Responsibilities"
#3: On mailing lists, I've found the phrase "Let's all keep discussions civil" to work well and have the desired effect, and would suggest including that phrasing here too. In addition to Inactive Moderators, can you add some guidance on what steps to do if a moderator is not behaving acceptably? I'm imagining this might either be a unanimous vote of the other moderators, or perhaps if that won't work, some kind of escalation to a higher authority, or something. I'm imagining this will be exceedingly rare, but having a process spelled out might help it be even more rare. ;-)
Yes, "civil" sounds good. I'll put it in.
Well, the CoC is specific about a complaint about a moderator. ("If you believe you have been unfairly penalized by a moderator, you may contact Inkscape's board. Decisions of the board are final.")
Are you talking about other moderators taking some kind of action (well, demoting that moderator, I guess)? Or maybe just a mutual mentoring of each other? I envision moderators collaborating as much as possible - we even have a board only for moderators. I would hope the collaboration would keep us mostly all on the same page.
It's so hard to think in terms of the worst case scenario, when as a whole, that has been very rare. I agree that it's good to have it covered. I just find it hard to write about it, when so many potential situations have never happened. And they have so many potential solutions.
"Complaints"
I think some text may be worth adding here regarding, "What if I feel a moderator is treating me unfairly?" Escalating to the CoC is appropriate for major issues, but for minor complaints about a moderator it may be better if there is some guidance on how to address it within the forum moderation team. The Forum Etiquette section is great, and I wonder if it should be at the top of the document, since that's probably what you want *everyone* to read. Unless your plan is to have this officially live here, but cut and paste it into appropriate areas of the forum.
Hhmm.... Is this the same question as just above? Oh I see, you just want it written into the complaint section too?
Yes, Martin wants the Etiquette section switched around too. Will do!
Hhmm, would it work to copy/paste the relevant parts of the CoC into the Regular Members section and Complain section? I'm not sure. But I can think of a couple of clarifications I can add anyway.
It'll make a great foundation to build on.
Aaww, and here I thought it was almost finished. Or do you mean build on over the years?
As I said in my reply to Martin, I don't know where it's supposed to live. I think it would work well to have a Forum Moderators team (on the website Teams page) and this document would be the Charter. On the other hand, as a governing document (as it were), perhaps SFC should hold it?
Thanks for your input, Bryce!
brynn
-----Original Message----- From: Bryce Harrington Sent: Thursday, March 14, 2019 9:47 PM To: brynn Cc: Inkscape User Community ; Inkscape-Devel Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] rules and guidelines for new forum - first draft
On Wed, Mar 13, 2019 at 11:07:14PM -0600, brynn wrote:
Hi Friends, As it turned out, only me and a couple of other people were interested in drafting the rules and guidelines for the new forum. So we can get more eyes on it, and possibly more professional opinions about it, I'd like to ask the community to have a look at it.
Yay! It's awesome seeing this task has come along so well.
I have no background in writing such documents, so it's purely alayperson's whack at it. I feel quite confident about the contents, based on my years of experience in Inkscape forums. But the format of the document, and possibly some of the language might need some technical advice.
So any an all comments and suggestions about the format or languageare very welcome.
https://gitlab.com/inkscape/vectors/content/blob/master/articles/Forum%20Rul...
(I've left it locked to editing, so everyone sees the same doc, forthis first review. Then I'll unlock it afterwards.)
"Prerequisites for being a moderator"
* Age requirements * Time availability
It also mentions requiring previous experience as a forum moderator (on an external forum I suppose?) I take it you expect there's going to be plenty enough people with past experience?
"Moderator Duties and Responsibilities"
#3: On mailing lists, I've found the phrase "Let's all keep discussions civil" to work well and have the desired effect, and would suggest including that phrasing here too.
In addition to Inactive Moderators, can you add some guidance on what steps to do if a moderator is not behaving acceptably? I'm imagining this might either be a unanimous vote of the other moderators, or perhaps if that won't work, some kind of escalation to a higher authority, or something. I'm imagining this will be exceedingly rare, but having a process spelled out might help it be even more rare. ;-)
"Complaints"
I think some text may be worth adding here regarding, "What if I feel a moderator is treating me unfairly?" Escalating to the CoC is appropriate for major issues, but for minor complaints about a moderator it may be better if there is some guidance on how to address it within the forum moderation team.
The Forum Etiquette section is great, and I wonder if it should be at the top of the document, since that's probably what you want *everyone* to read. Unless your plan is to have this officially live here, but cut and paste it into appropriate areas of the forum.
Thanks for working on this, it reads very easy and as a lot of common sense. It'll make a great foundation to build on.
Bryce
Thank you very much, brynn
PS - I'm also posting about this in the forums.
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