2020 Moderator Election - Announcement

Question

Expatriates will begin the nomination stage for a special election on July 6th to bring in one more moderator.

For full details of the process, see the announcement on Meta Stack Exchange. The timeline:

• Starting on July 6th, users can nominate themselves. Users can also ask questions on meta for potential moderators to answer. (Use the discussion and election tags.)

• On July 13th, if there are two or more candidates, we'll run an election. If not, I'll simply appoint the candidate. (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 July 21st.

(Note for current moderators: there's no need to nominate yourself even though you'll likely get an email saying you should. The system assumes the first election is a graduation election, which would mean moderators would need to be re-elected. This isn't that sort of election.)

If you have any questions about the process, please stick them in an answer here.

Answer 1

Are moderators required to sign up to agreements that muffle their voice about criticism of StackExchange corporate policies? I'm notoriously politically incorrect. And I've openly spoken out against certain corporate objectives. It's not hard for me to imagine getting run off the site for expressing opinions that, as a normal user, perhaps wouldn't cause quite the same reaction from the company. I've demonstrated a willingness and eagerness to take on extra roles for moderating and maintaining the site, and I'm quite happy to keep that up or take on those extra responsibilities should they become available to me.

I know for myself that I would be just fine handling the extra duties and dedicating some of the already significant the time I spend on here to those tasks. But some of the company structure has clearly changed recently, and there have been certain pronouncements and actions by the company which I consider wildly off-topic, borderline offensively inappropriate, and perhaps even dangerously counterproductive. I've been active on StackExchange across a variety of sites for almost a decade and not once has my my race/ethnicity, gender/orientation, religion or immigration status (even here on Expats) played a role in my moderation efforts. As a moderator, I'd fully expect that to continue to be the case. If I'm not allowed to express those kind of opinions on here, I just question if I'm a good fit for the role of a moderator as seen from the company perspective.