8
votes
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Our primary chat room, The Garbage Collector, currently has five room owners, who have a few moderation abilities like pinning messages, clearing spam stars, and moving spam messages to trash rooms. Our current five ROs are:

These ROs, along with now-mod lyxal (who removed himself as RO once elected mod), were copied over from our planning room during the earlier stages of our site proposal, who were just added by the room creator (Rydwolf Programs) upon request. Now that we've grown into a public site, and have an official main room, there's been some discussion of choosing our ROs more democratically.

So, how should we choose The Garbage Collector's ROs? Should we keep the current ones? Or, if we should hold an election, how many ROs should we elect, and should the current ones need to run for reelection?

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  • $\begingroup$ If Lyxal and/or Adam are elected moderators, do they need to be ROs, too? $\endgroup$
    – Bbrk24
    Commented Jul 12, 2023 at 17:42
  • $\begingroup$ @Bbrk24 That's one thing we should probably discuss. Mods have all of the powers ROs do (except maybe some weird edge case I'm not aware of), so it would make sense to me if we decided mods couldn't run. Or, since any pro tempore mods we get now may lose that position when we graduate due to more competition, we could maybe allow them to run but if they get enough votes, just not deduct them from the number of ROs we choose to elect (e.g., if we choose to elect 6, we might add 6 ROs plus one of the mods if they run) $\endgroup$
    – rydwolf
    Commented Jul 12, 2023 at 17:44
  • $\begingroup$ Heads up: I've locked this post as Obsolete, as the election already has a nomination phase, and will most likely move to the voting phase. Also, this was for the initial RO election, so future ROs can be selected through different processes chosen by a new meta post. Hence the lock. $\endgroup$
    – lyxal Mod
    Commented Jul 24, 2023 at 12:42

1 Answer 1

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8
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Election, minimum 6 ROs

I propose we do an election, and choose the top 6 candidates by score whose upvotes/downvotes ratio is 2:1 or better. Current ROs wouldn't automatically keep their position; they'd need to run officially in the election. Mods should be allowed to run, but shouldn't count toward the 6 ROs (since they'd have RO powers anyway; running would just allow them to keep the RO powers if they lose their mod diamond).

This should be done in two phases, a nomination phase where votes don't matter, and an election phase where the answers are posted by a bot/sock account (so nobody forfeits the ability to vote). Both should last one week.

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  • $\begingroup$ Sounds good to me. $\endgroup$
    – Pseudonym
    Commented Jul 13, 2023 at 12:23
  • 4
    $\begingroup$ I think maybe rather than a vote on meta maybe it should be held on a platform where the vote counts are private $\endgroup$
    – lyxal Mod
    Commented Jul 13, 2023 at 13:13
  • $\begingroup$ Will the existing ROs be replaced if not elected? $\endgroup$
    – Seggan
    Commented Jul 13, 2023 at 14:44
  • $\begingroup$ @Seggan-OnStrike Yes, we'd be electing them from scratch. $\endgroup$
    – rydwolf
    Commented Jul 13, 2023 at 16:19
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    $\begingroup$ @lyxal Maybe, but off-platform things are complicated. You have to make sure each SE account only votes once, and you also need to drive sufficient traffic to it that people vote at all. Voting on SE is imperfect but it's how CGCC's always done it for RO votes, and for good reason. $\endgroup$
    – rydwolf
    Commented Jul 13, 2023 at 16:20
  • $\begingroup$ @RydwolfPrograms of course and hosting the vote here is definitely the easiest way to ensure the votes are fair. I just wonder if there would be some way of having votes hidden. $\endgroup$
    – lyxal Mod
    Commented Jul 13, 2023 at 22:13
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    $\begingroup$ It might be good to block users who have been suspended in the past year, similar to mod elections. $\endgroup$
    – Redz
    Commented Jul 13, 2023 at 23:22
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    $\begingroup$ @Redzsupportsthestrike IMO that's unnecessary. SE in general takes a pretty "forgive and forget" stance on suspended users, mods are kind of an exception since they could like, do a serious amount of damage and have a ton of information/PII at their disposal. (Digging through peoples' histories to see if they were suspended and having to discuss that publically kind of ruins the "forget" part, too) $\endgroup$
    – rydwolf
    Commented Jul 14, 2023 at 5:09
  • $\begingroup$ @RydwolfPrograms that makes sense, thank you for the clarification! $\endgroup$
    – Redz
    Commented Jul 14, 2023 at 5:15
  • $\begingroup$ any age restrictions? $\endgroup$
    – The Empty String Photographer
    Commented Jul 19, 2023 at 17:21
  • $\begingroup$ @PlaceReporter99 Nope, ROs don't have access to any PII or need to sign any contracts, so as long as you're old enough to have an SE account you're old enough to run $\endgroup$
    – rydwolf
    Commented Jul 19, 2023 at 17:34

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