We’re 2 weeks into the private beta for Solana Stack Exchange — around halfway through the site's private beta phase — so I thought it'd be a good time to cover 2 topics to get you thinking about the site's future:
- How can you help the site make it from Private to Public Beta?
- Your initial Pro-Tem Moderator Election, if you make it into Public Beta!
So what can you do to help the Solana site make it to public Beta?
Read through the help center: We have a comprehensive help center with articles explaining how most of our system works. We suggest you go through some of the articles there — especially if you're new to the Stack Exchange network.
Vote early, vote often: Voting is how good content gets recognized, wrong or incoherent content is signaled, and how a community of editors, closers, stewards, and moderators comes into existence in the SE network. Read more in this blog post and in this FAQ on Meta Stack Exchange, and be careful not to engage in voting fraud or sock-puppeting.
Discuss what your site is about on Meta: The Essential Questions of Every Beta is a community-curated revised version of an earlier blog post that lists a few of the most important things new communities should be discussing in Meta. You should be making use of your Meta site to discuss things like:
- Are questions about [subject] on- or off-topic?
- What should our documentation contain?
- How should we tag questions about [subject]?
- What's the site's 'elevator pitch'?
- How do we promote our site?
Edit, close, or delete content: Sometimes questions or answers need a little tweak, either because they have typos or because they don't quite fit the site's scope without some edits; you should help out by editing those posts. Sometimes questions are beyond being salvageable, though, and you should instead be closing or deleting them.
Invite fellow experts to the site: There's an "invite fellow experts" box on the site's right sidebar – make use of it!
Start building guidance for tags: Tags are an important way to sort content in our sites, and having the proper guidance on how tags should be used is essential to ensure content is properly tagged. Read more here about tagging, and here about providing tag guidance.
Initial Pro-Tem Moderator Election: Community Interest Check
Now that we've covered what you can do to help the site move into Public Beta, let's cover what comes next if it does: the election to choose your first pro-tem moderators.
What does it take to be a Moderator?
Prior to 2018, pro-tem moderators would be picked by staff, and the Community Management team would look for users who:
- Have a reasonably high reputation score to indicate active, consistent participation.
- 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.
- Have an eye for content that should be flagged, closed or removed and act on that within the expectations of the community and Stack Exchange generally.
Electing your moderators
In 2018, however, we started experimenting with hosting elections for beta sites to choose their pro-tem moderators, in addition to the community-elected moderators in sites not in Beta, in the rest of the network. The process is mostly the same, but if you’re interested in the full details, see the announcement on Meta Stack Exchange.
In accordance with that, I’m here today to pre-announce this site’s first pro-tem election and invite users interested in nominating to state their intention to do so here. Additionally, if you feel someone would be a good fit as a moderator on this site, feel free to use an answer to this question to support them and encourage them to run. The timeline:
Starting on the Monday following the site moving into Public Beta (week 1), users can nominate themselves in the election page. Users can also ask questions on meta for potential moderators to answer. (Use the discussion and election tags.)
On the following Monday (week 2), if there are 4 or more candidates, we'll run an election. If not, I'll extend the nomination period for a week. If, at the end of that extension period there are still less than 4 candidates, I'll simply appoint the candidates. (There's a small chance we'll need to remove a nomination.)
If there is an election, I'll announce the results on meta on the following Tuesday (week 3) (or the one after that, on week 4, if we need to extend the nomination period).
NOTES:
- This is not an official election nomination thread. It’s just a "pulse check" to get a notion of how many people here would be willing to step up, so you don't have to put up your whole election nomination here.
- This does not mean that the site has been cleared to leave Private Beta. The dates for the election are provisional and subject to change, and the election as a whole is dependent on Solana meeting the requirements to progress from Private into Public Beta.
If you have any questions about the election or site lifecycle processes, please stick them in an answer here.