Election check-in - Who's interested in stepping up to help being a moderator here?

Question

As you all know, our community currently only has two active moderators which is a bit low for a site of our size. Therefore, we'd like to hold a moderator election in the coming months.

We noticed a reluctance of candidates to nominate themselves for the previous election and only managed to find enough at the very end of the nomination period. We'd like to avoid that, and especially the worst case where an election would fail due to an insufficient number of candidates. Therefore, I'm posting this question on behalf of the moderator team and Community Managers, to check if community members are willing to step up and nominate themselves when we hold an election. To know more about the duties of a moderator, please have a look at the FAQ on Meta Stack Exchange.

Please leave an answer if you'd be willing to run for a moderator position, should we decide to run an election.

NOTE: This is not an official election nomination thread, just a "pulse check" to get a notion of how many people here would be willing to step up.

_{(inspired by this post on Web Applications Meta)}

Answer 1

I'll run for mod, if you'll have me.

I'm a little ashamed it took me so long to step forward for this. I had some complicated feelings holding me back at first and at least one major event since this meta question was first posted that made things possibly even more complicated. As for those feelings, it really can be hard to depart from the Stack Exchange model, to have people vote on you instead of your content. But, ultimately, I think there was only one feeling of all of them that really mattered to me, whatever feeling it is that makes me want to ensure that our site thrives.

My numbers here on ELL may not be the highest, but they're decent. I'm on ELL pretty much every day and I've been putting more effort into being active here lately. Plus — allegedly — some people believe that I may be suited to moderating a site covering the subject of the English language, or even written expression in general.

Answer 2

I am willing to run. I log into SE almost every day. ELL is my second site in terms of rep, Law.SE is my first. On ELL I am pretty much always answering, not asking.

I have not been a moderator on SE, but have moderated some forum-type sites, and have been an admin on Wikipedia.

Answer 3

Things to know about being a moderator on ELL:

• You don't have to log in every day... or even every other day. The amount of time you have to spend moderating is very flexible. If you need to be away from the site for a longer period of time you can set yourself as inactive without needing to resign.

• You don't have to be an expert in English. A moderator's job doesn't involve answering questions about English. You just need to be able to communicate in English well enough to communicate with ELL community members, and read well enough understand the various SE codes, policies and other documents attached to this site.

• The types of flags you handle on ELL are usually pretty mundane. If there's any situation you don't feel comfortable moderating, you can always ask someone else on the mod team or from the company's "Community Manger" (CM) team for help.

• You don't have to have a lot of reputation to be a moderator, but you should have some experience with the review queues and be familiar with Stack Exchange policies and content guidelines. As a moderator, you will be able to close or reopen a question with a single vote, delete comments and posts, lock or add notices to posts, etc. The rest of the mod team will help you, but you may not be able to convince users to vote for you if you seem like you know very little.

Answer 4

As a fairly recently elected ELL Mod, and with this as my first ever Stack Exchange Moderator position, I'll add my perspective.

Also, please ask your own questions in the comments about what it's like being a new Mod here, and I'll either answer there or edit this post.

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I ran last fall because then Moderator EddieKal asked me to, though I hadn't considered it before. I think I had 1.4k reputation then. At first I thought it was laughable, but when I seriously considered what I had to offer, I realized Eddie had a point, so I ran.

The workload is not heavy at all. These days, I drop in nearly every day, and spend usually only a minute or two on mod work, rarely more than 30 mins. Typically there's one or two quick flags to deal with. It takes longer if I have to write something, like a comment or a reply to a user's flag. If there's someone I have to suspend, I might take an hour or two to write and assemble that letter. Of course, I can easily spend hours visiting the review queues, but that's not mod-specific work.

When I started out here, I got a ton of support, mostly from my fellow ELL Mods, but also from the many other resources available to us. One is a chat room for all the SE Mods. There's always someone there ready to answer my questions not specific to ELL, and I almost always get a response within minutes. Another major resource is a whole secret SE Q&A site just for Mods. It's quite similar to a Meta site, but it's all about modding, so when I have a question that I expect has been asked before, I go there and find an answer along with lots of other aspects to the question I hadn't considered. A third resource is the SE staff that liaise with the Mods, called Community Managers. Every SE site has a team of CMs assigned to it who know the culture and history of the site, and work closely with Mods on just about anything. If I'm ever overwhelmed with a big decision specific to ELL, and the other Mods aren't available to get back to me, one of our site's CMs steps in. They're very focused on supporting Mods. So overall, even if you're fresh to SE modding like I was, you'll have a soft landing so long as you're ready to learn.

When I started, the other Mods purposefully left the easier flags unresolved so I'd have something to do, and to get the feel for things. Glorfindel and I will do the same for anyone who's elected. For the more challenging issues --like deciding whether to delete an account-- sometimes I asked for input using the various resources listed above, but mostly I dug into the site's policy docs and the various Meta sites for guidance and I was able to do it myself. This was also good because while doing that I learned a whole bunch of other things about our policies, history and community expectations, which made future decisions much easier.

Answer 5

Just a reminder that the site is accepting nominees for the 2022 election.
So far there is only one candidate, but we need more candidates in order to elect the best people to moderate our site.

On ELL there are only three requisites to nominate yourself:

1. You must be aged 18 or over

2. You must have more than 300 reputation points

3. You must not have been suspended on any Stack Exchange site in the last 12 months
   (which excludes me)

See: There's an election going on. What's happening and how does it work?