Mod Responsibilities & Nominations

manny · December 2, 2021, 12:38pm

RFC Title:

Discord & Discourse Moderation Responsibilities & Nominations

NOTE: Just remember this is a discussion and not a finalized proposal. Getting feedback from the community and Guild Leaders is essential to put things forward.

Author:

Manny (discord: codingwithmanny#0205) (discourse: @manny)

Created:

2021-12-01

Brief Overview of Proposal:

Put in place a process to define moderators for Developer DAO so that members know the responsibilities and how to get nominated.

Goals and Scope:

Goal

The goal is to make sure there is a defined process of how moderators can be nominated in Discord and Discourse to ensure a fair process and ensure that responsibilities are upheld for aiding/supporting the community and accountability.

Scope

Given that there are already existing Core Team Members & Guild Leaders, it should be noted that Guild Leaders = Core Team Members. If a member doesn’t fit into that category, it should be considered a special case with reasoning for moderation (which helps the community as a whole).

Moderation Responsibilities

Aided in specific guild tasks and support community
Moderate user discussions in channels to make sure they adhere to the community guidelines
In rare cases, after discussing with a Guild Leader, and providing evidence, remove users that do not adhere to community guidelines

Timeline Of Responsibilities

Responsibilities should last quarterly or the span of a Season, whichever is shorter. Afterwards the role should be re-evaluated to give others a chance to participate or give an existing moderator a break.

Inactivity / Revocation

If a moderator does not seem to be helping the community or is reported by more than 2-3 people that they aren’t helping, their moderation status could be revoked (still at the discretion of a Guild Leader).

To prevent abuse of reporting, revocation/re-assigning of roles will be re-evaluated as per Timeline of Responsibilities.

Who Should Be Moderators?

Guild Leaders

Current moderation roles should be given to Guild Leaders.

Based on Season 0, stands to be:

Guild	Person
Community	`kempsterrrr`
Design	`Eknobl`
Developer	`Mark (with-heart)`
Writers	`marc`
Governance	`willblackburn`
Marketing/Biz-Dev	`Nader`

Nominated Guild Leader Support

Each leader should be given a determined (ratio to be determined) amount of moderators that they can nominate to help them within their respective guilds. The number should be relative to the guild size so that there isn’t an excess of moderators but still enough to support guild leaders.

Example Proposal:

Developer Guild = 1188 Members

For every 100 members = 1 Moderator

Developer Guild Moderatorss = 11 Moderators

Exception(s):

An exception may be that kempsterrrr (Community Guild Leader) may encompass more than its active members, to accommodate the larger community that hasn’t joined a Guild.

Advisors

As default, advisors should not be given moderation status unless they are helping with the current guilds.

Special Cases

A special case mentioned is that bots play an integral role within the DAO and moderation should be given to those who understand them the best in order to fix them.

NOTE: It might even make sense to create a Bot/Operations Guild

As of now that stands to be (more to be determined):

Nathanng.eth

NoahH

Guild Leader Responsibilities With Moderators

As Guild Leaders nominate and add members as moderators to support their respective guilds, a Guild Leader should be responsible for making sure that moderators have the tools needed to do their job in the form of support and other information.

Guild Leaders should also make an effort to community within their Guilds that people can reach out to specific moderators and highlight them to better introduce them to the community so that people feel comfortable reaching out to them for help.

Background & Motivation:

As the DAO gets more and more mature there will need to be a transition from the existing guard that helped support the community early on and more needed to help support the incoming demand to support the larger community.

The goal is to give transparency and identify moderators for people to go to for help when needed.

Design / Implementation:

(None)

Timeline:

A proposed timeline for this transition would be a month (tentatively) to give all parties a decent amount of time to transition in or out of their moderator roles, but not too long to avoid stagnation.

Dependencies:

This will heavily depend on the guild leaders and core team members of the DAO to help transition some members out of moderation and nominate moderators to help them within their guild.

Risks:

Some people will feel alienated, but as it currently stands it’s hard to identify who some members are and whether or not they are currently helping the overall community with their current moderation roles. As a counter argument it could be said that people already feel alienated as there is no current process and is done in an ad hoc way that may promote exclusivity without reason (special members only club).

Resources:

1 - A resource needed would be a full audit of all existing moderators on both platforms to better identify the current status of the DAO.

2 - Another resource would be that we need a mechanism to notify the community that specific DAO moderators should be given more visibility so that members know who to reach out when needing support on their project or endeavours within the DAO.

3 - A mechanism should also be in place to report if a moderator isn’t fulfilling their responsibilities or doing something that isn’t following the community guidelines.

This could be in the form of an anonymous form, similar to the existing one we have

dhaiwat10 · December 2, 2021, 2:40pm

A lot of the current mods aren’t active at all so yeah putting actual moderators in place for each guild - sounds good to me

gjsyme · December 2, 2021, 3:47pm

I think that Guild Leaders should be their own role so that they’re called out in the Discord sidebar. Give them Mod rights too, but make them their own special case.

Your post talks about mods in relation to each guild - are they going to be scoped to their guild, or just that there will be X total mods with Y mods from dev/gov/design/etc where Y is INSERT_FORMULA_PER_GUILD?

I think that Mods would fall under community due to the impact that moderation has on community, but that’s just a thought.

We should put some thought into ensuring that we have some level of redundant coverage around the clock so that no timezone is left hung out to dry / we don’t have a single point of failure on the ability to respond to spam,etc at a non-peak time.

manny · December 2, 2021, 4:02pm

I think that Guild Leaders should be their own role so that they’re called out in the Discord sidebar. Give them Mod rights too, but make them their own special case.

Agree, there should be a distinction in Discord.

Your post talks about mods in relation to each guild - are they going to be scoped to their guild, or just that there will be X total mods with Y mods from dev/gov/design/etc where Y is INSERT_FORMULA_PER_GUILD?

You lost me at X and Y lol. My thinking was just coverage, wether 1 mod per 100 or 50 or 200, but with the exception that community Guild would need more to cover the larger community that hasn’t joined a guild.

I think that Mods would fall under community due to the impact that moderation has on community, but that’s just a thought.

Agree there would still be “Community Guild Moderators”, which may have more, but I think it would be fair to have those who are active in Guilds be promoted as well because they are living within the sub-community of the Guild and interacting with it more on a day to day basis to identify needs. At least that’s my thinking behind it. It would also be easier to identify those moderators within the Guild, and my hopes is that it would make it easier to approach them.

We should put some thought into ensuring that we have some level of redundant coverage around the clock so that no timezone is left hung out to dry / we don’t have a single point of failure on the ability to respond to spam,etc at a non-peak time.

I like this. Like a certain percentage that covers timezones. Might even be worth doing a census that includes timezone coverage.

wolovim · December 3, 2021, 4:30am

Thanks for putting this together!

There is a need for mods beyond the guilds. Language channels, like #chinese, would best be moderated by someone who speaks the language. IRL and LIVE EVENTS categories need someone(s) to own the regular creation and archiving of channels. As @gjsyme suggests, these could be roles owned by Community Guild members.
Tightening things up here is important for another reason: mod privileges should be given sparingly for security reasons.

The blanket mod privileges of today permit the banning of users, deleting of channels, and other unrecoverable actions. The concern isn’t so much that a mod would go rogue, but that if one of their devices were compromised, it could have the same effect.

Implementation details zone – We should require 2FA and limit the scope of each mod’s privileges. Specific Discord roles can be created for category or channel-specific moderation, e.g., a moderator of the LIVE EVENTS category can create and archive channels within that category, but maybe not be able to ping @everyone or delete Writers Guild channels.

nomador · December 4, 2021, 4:43am

These are all really great points!

I agree that currently the mods, including myself were just borne from who was interested in the time but now the needs of dev dao have evolved beyond that. It naturally makes sense to create more concrete definitions of mods.

I like the idea of having a set number of mods per category and per guild, but not per channel. It can be up-to the mods to decide which channels they tend to keep up with. Channel-specific might get too chaotic as channels are added or removed over time.

1 mod per 100 members seems reasonable, however I also believe we should take timezones into consideration. If we have 11 mods in developer guild alone - we should try and ensure there is enough overlap that we have members covered in most time zones. We should consider that within the nomination process. Also seems like 11 might be overkill, if you count all the mods across guilds, across categories, etc that may be quite a huge number.

TLDR:

Love the ideas in here, this is timely!
Set a number of mods per category, and per guild, so we’re not forgetting about moderation under developers, IRL, etc.
Should be a reasonable number of mods overall too, considering categories and guilds. 1 for every 100 may be too many? Open to discuss more.
Should factor in time-zones for mods so we ensure overlap, and keep moderation going for most time-zones

with-heart · December 4, 2021, 1:51pm

I think that Guild Leaders should be their own role so that they’re called out in the Discord sidebar. Give them Mod rights too, but make them their own special case.

Yeah I think it’s good to broadcast some of the roles to give some clarity of like who is in what role especially for “official leadership” type stuff

I see a need for two categories of mods:

Global moderators that act as an autonomous team to define their own role (ceremonies, processes, etc.) and decide how best to accomplish some DAO-wide moderation goals (TBD, but probably things like preventing abuse, encouraging community engagement, etc.)
Space-specific moderators similar to the above but with less autonomy. Role and permissions are scoped to the specific space they moderate. Possibly expected to participate in occasional ceremonies with global moderator team to help discover+distribute moderation “best practices”.

I think it makes sense to have a formula for determining the number of global moderators so that we can have distributed representation from each guild, though I do wonder how that distribution changes as we form new guilds and if the “members divided by 100” makes sense (if all of our members joined only 1 guild, that’s still 55 global moderators which seems like a lot…).

I don’t think it makes sense to have a formula for space-specific moderators. We should allow the space to determine its own moderation needs.

For example, within the development guild, I’d like to have a moderation team specific to our guild focused on:

rules enforcement
creating culture, fostering a sense of community
shepherding conversation into threads
managing channels (i hate being the only one able to create channels in our space)
onboarding (at least until we have more specific processes/teams for that)

I don’t think every space has a need for that type of moderation, but I believe ours does and I plan to move forward with that so we can start iterating and experimenting within our own space.

At the same time, I think we have a clear need for the role at a more global level, which is why I think we have a need for two categories. The two categories executing with similar yet different purposes and scales will lead to a lot of autonomy and exploration which will lead us towards a path of excellent moderation.

We should require 2FA and limit the scope of each mod’s privileges. Specific Discord roles can be created for category or channel-specific moderation, e.g., a moderator of the LIVE EVENTS category can create and archive channels within that category, but maybe not be able to ping @everyone or delete Writers Guild channels.

Should factor in time-zones for mods so we ensure overlap, and keep moderation going for most time-zones

fishbiscuit · December 5, 2021, 3:35pm

Based on the feedback so far, it’s great that we’re in agreement in terms of the need of having moderation team that can cater to multiple timezones and are empowered to carry out important actions throughout the Discord server.

It seems that we are ready to explore the implementation phase after each guild has taken some time to take a look at this proposal that describes the need for moderators.

Thereafter, we’d need to have

Mod responsibilities document - to be formalised and will probably include compensation then DevDAO is ready
Mod actions channel/ page - to ensure accountability and transparency, this would also serve as a place for people to dispute Mod actions.
Mod nomination and refresh process - the initial implementation would just be having Guild leaders nominate potential mods while taking into account the timezone needs, manpower needs, and commitment levels of nominees. We probably won’t be able to nominate and fully staff our Mod manpower needs at the start and should prioritise focusing on the process of refreshing our Mods.

nas · December 13, 2021, 1:48pm

I support this RFC. Thank you for putting it together!

Lack of access permissions on both discord and notion encourages people to use own tools - notion and telegram. keen to see new model for assigning privileges. Agree with @with-heart - like the idea of a guild specific mod that can be assigned by the guild lead.

I personally simply want the right to create channels and add new partners to those channels by creating a partner specific role. I can imagine the channel and role setup we are currently using for partners falling down pretty fast and needing categories based on lenses they are interested in partnering on with channels dedicated to those.