No, my proposal is only as detailed as what I’ve written. I do like this idea though, so we can consider that at the same time.
Here’s clarification and more detail on what I’m thinking we could do. The aim is to clarify moderator and member responsibilities, and reduce the amount of work involved, while keeping the community in the driving seat:
- we define the procedure(s) open to members who are unhappy with something, or who want something changed, as part of the guidelines.
- moderation becomes a matter of mods applying the guidelines, which the community are also responsible for following and accepting, but which can be changed as needed according to the appropriate process.
- guidelines explain that mods don’t need to get involved with discussions with individuals over decisions they’re making day to day, while ensuring they can still be held to account by the community, according to the defined procedure. Members are required to accept decisions, or use the appropriate procedure to request a change. Essentially mods just act, do their best to apply the guidelines, and users accept this, or raise it with the community if they feel it is important enough and something needs to change.
- we need to think through if one procedure is enough for all issues or if we need more than one. But let’s assume one is enough for now, and that it is something like: post a request for community action, giving the nature of the action you want taken, and any information you wish to provide that supports your request and which the community will need in order to vote on the issue, and include a poll which allows members to vote for or against your requested action. On the topic members can ask for more information from you or anyone else involved, and can express their opinions and explain why they think this or that. After a set period, quorum etc (to be decided) mods will close the poll and act on the outcome. We can give a couple of example posts to help when people who want to do this.
- I think we should limit the frequency an individual can do this, or how soon a particular issue can be revisited etc (again to be decided)
- I think we should also limit this to members of a certain trust level
This would make it harder to raise disputes over isolated incidents or disagreements, or for changes that don’t have broad appeal, encouraging us all to just get on with it. At the same time it would ensure that serious issues can always be raised, by anyone with standing (the trust level we set) and that the community as a whole decide the outcome - and makes this fact crystal clear in the guidelines. That has always been how we moderators have acted, but it hasn’t been made clear that’s how we were working.