Update: Given the level of interest expressed, an election kicked off on July 11th. Nominations are now open. See a full timeline on this post.
It is Stack Exchange's stance that every site needs to have a team of moderators in order to continue existing on the network. We have over 170 sites on SE; participation, the frequency of new questions asked, etc. varies from site to site. However, as long as a site has some activity and members willing to act as moderators, that's enough to keep a site going (see the "tangible guidelines for site closure" section on this post).
If a moderator has been inactive for over 6 months, we typically remove their access to mod tools and reach out to the rest of the moderation team to see if an election is needed to replace the outgoing moderator. Sometimes, if a site has a lower amount of flags or issues that require moderator intervention, the system will mark a moderator who is checking in and engaging on a regular basis as inactive, which is why the Community Managers always check in before automatically removing a moderator. However, we have found ourselves in an unusual situation with the Tezos Stack Exchange site.
Tezos Stack Exchange currently has two moderators, but both of them have been inactive for over six months. However, this doesn't appear to be simply due to low site activity (in which case the site simply wouldn't have needed much moderation activity). Rather, the current moderators do not appear to have been online in quite a while. There isn't a huge number of unanswered flags, but some of them have been there since late last year. We've reached out to the moderators several times, but we have not received any response back. We hope they are okay and that perhaps they are busy with other things, but we believe the time has come for this community to have some new moderators.
We'd like to get a sense of whether there are community members here who would be willing to step up and run in an election. Your site recently left Beta, so this would typically be the time for us to run a "Graduation" election for your site, which would need to be competitive (meaning that the number of candidates must be greater than the number of moderator slots) in order to be successful. We could also run this as a Pro-Tem election, in which case a Community Manager can appoint qualified candidates if there are not enough candidates to make the election competitive.
We'd love to hear from your community regarding how much interest there is in keeping the Tezos Stack Exchange site going. New questions are asked on a regular basis, and there is active participation in the Q&A for this site, so it feels like there is value and engagement in this community. We just need 3-4 members willing to serve as moderators.
Any community member in good standing with more than 300 reputation (and who is at least 18 years old) may nominate themself to be a community moderator.If you want to know about what goes into being a moderator, see this Help Center page: Who are the site moderators, and what is their role here?
We look forward to hearing from you, the Tezos Stack Exchange community. Once we gauge how much interest there is, we can work with y'all on scheduling an election and deciding whether it would be more appropriate to run it as a graduation election or a pro-tem election. If you would be interested in nominating yourself in an election, please post an answer here to let us know.
