I took the rest of Friday and Saturday away from CP just to kind of reset myself after this past week.
While gone, I see the discussion has continued into whether or not we should have more specific rules around the forums. I appreciate everyone’s input, and want you to know I have read through everything.
There are couple of questions I think need to be answered prior to moving forward in either direction, and I have more drafted posts once we have a consensus on the questions below.
In specifics, what is the role of the community team? I think part of this confusion comes from lack of understanding and clear roles that the community team should be responsible for.
Connected to that, what is the role of the community team lead? Do they have final say in regards to moderation/forum admin? When disagreements happen between moderators, should those discussions get resolved by the team lead? Or, is there another function I haven’t thought of?
When users disagree with a specific team’s decision, should they go to that team’s lead to discuss it (e.g. if you disagree with the direction of the core team, should you not take that to @james)?
If moderators are part of the community team then I’d say the team lead should have final say, unless there is a separate moderation team under the community team with its own lead.
I’d say generally a team lead should always be the escalation point for disagreement with the teams decisions. There is room for a discussion if there should be an appeals route which is decided by someone outside of the relevant team.
To be honest, I don’t know what the community team is at all. I’m confused by the whole arrangement. I can see that we have 4 admins and 2 moderators (@rui and @mte90). I can see that Wade is the Community Team Lead.
I have no idea where I fit into this. I seem to have been given some power to do extra stuff on the forum but I’m not a moderator.
To me, the main role of the community team lead, at least so far as the forums are concerned, is to ensure that all the mods are clear what the rules (or whatever we have in place at any given moment) say, convene meetings among the mods to discuss any issues, and ensure consistency of treatment by the mods.
More thematically, the team leader’s role should be to build up the community team and its members as part of his/her wider function of helping to grow the community. It’s really a sort of HR function.
On that footing, the community team leader would normally also be the person who takes charge of dealing with a complaint about a mod (except, of course, when such a complaint is about him or her).
What I emphatically don’t think the team leader should be doing is a great deal of modding. If s/he is busy modding, then that creates a conflict of interest for the above functions, because s/he is then often going find him- or herself in the position of reviewing his or her own decisions, and it’s just human nature to get defensive then.
I completly agree with everything that Tim said above.
Regarding what happened last week that when I looked at it the topics were already deleted so I’m a bit out of the real context. Maybe in the future in situations like that one that we need to talk just in case the situation falls in a specific thing that wasn’t part of the forum guidelines.
Honestly I think we should limit the edition after x hours or y days, the edition can always be made by request to the moderators in case it’s something important/relevant to edit.
@wadestriebel Regarding your questions this is my opinion:
Manage the community team, ensure that the community engagment is positive and growing as a community. Helping each others when possible in our volunteer time. Resuming, do the best to create a better community.
When there any disagreements I think the team lead should have a final say unless all the rest of the team as a oposite position. I think the brainstorming some situation is important to get to a final decision.
I think not, imagine one person that doesn’t agree with other 5 persons on a specific issue. That person just as to respect the majority of the team decision, just like in any other votation.
p.s- I’ve been away for a while due to work, just trying to get back more often as I can.
IMHO part of the confusion is about what a mod is and why people with rank 3 like me have some mod capability.
What is a mod and what a mod can do is something falling In community team.
What a level 3 user does with his capabilities IMHO is an issue here.
I used such capabilities once myself to help with a support request. And I felt out of place.
As concerns what community team does and what community lead is responsible for… Someone above expressed my opinion so well I have nothing to add about that.
So, my question is: do we consider level 3 as first level mods entrusted for forum cleanup with ability to call in an higher up mod, and if needed the team lead? So we IMHO need guidelines for level 3, stating clearly what we aren’t entrusted to. And rules to help mods take decisions.
I think giving people mod powers based on their posting, responding and liking is a bad thing to do as they may have no understanding of what the rules are or how they are applied. Just because someone is active doesn’t mean they should be able to mod or even change posts.
That is what I am saying. Either pass to level 3 ONLY mods. And level 4 are supervisors… Or avoid levels to be assigned automatically or remove the mod capabilities from them alltogether.
To me the function of the community team is to maintain the channels our community uses to communicate. Mostly the forums so far, as Slack needs very little maintenance, and so far I am the one who creates new Slack channels when they are needed because of the overlap with our systems.
How best to do this, including how to collect input about what to do, should be up to the community team lead. As with anything else, the community has the right to override a decision via a petition with 50 votes. I don’t see that needing to happen any time soon but the path is already there.
I would caution strongly against adding new rules and processes the first time something goes wrong. It is many times easier to add a new rule or process than to refine or remove it later, and these things have a way of burying people in administrative work over time if we’re not careful.
Ahhhh… the same discussions about rules and moderation over and over again.
Forums are for discussion and communication purposes. The core team should use them to communicate with to those who use are interested to use CP and listen to their opinion. Such kind of discussions don’t need moderation. They are self moderated most of the times.
I assume that the core team has other more important things to do than moderate the forum boards.
