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The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it here.


Geographic Information Systems Stack Exchange is scheduled for an election next week, 2024-10-01. In connection with that, we will be holding a Q&A with the candidates. This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation. Participation is completely voluntary.

Here’s how it’ll work:

  • Until the nomination phase, (so, until 2024-10-01 at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 4:00 pm EDT on the same day, give or take time to arrive for closure), this question will be open to collect potential questions from the users of the site. Post answers to this question containing any questions you would like to ask the candidates. Please only post one question per answer.

  • If your question contains a link, please use the syntax of [text](link), as that will make it easier for transcribing for the finished questionnaire.

  • This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into currently.

  • We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The following two questions are guaranteed to be included:

    • How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?
    • How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc. a question that you feel shouldn’t have been?
  • The community team may also include the following three questions if the community doesn’t supply enough questions.

    • In your opinion, what do moderators do?
    • A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?
    • In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching enough reputation to access moderator tools or become a trusted user?
  • At the start of the nomination phase, the Community Team will select up to 8 of the top voted questions submitted by the community provided in this thread, to use in addition to the aforementioned 2 guaranteed questions. We reserve some editorial control in the selection of the questions and may opt not to select a question that is tangential or irrelevant to moderation or the election. We exclude any suggested questions that are negatively scored.

    • We will post the final questionnaire on the Election page. Candidates will have the option to fill out the questionnaire, and their answers will appear beneath their intro statements.
    • This is not the only option that users have for gathering information on candidates. As a community, you are still free to, for example, hold a live chat session with your candidates to ask further questions, or perhaps clarifications from what is provided in the Q&A.

If you have any questions or feedback about this process, feel free to post as a comment here.

5 Answers 5

4

Do you have the time to be a community moderator on GIS SE?

An old Meta SE question but still relevant is How much time do you spend on moderating?

3

GIS can be overwhelming for new users.

What steps would you take to help them write quality questions and feel comfortable engaging with the community, without being discouraged by complex topics or strict expectations?

Furthermore, how would you encourage experienced users to support beginners, even when they are asking simple beginner questions, rather than just resorting to downvotes or voting to close?

3

How should the site handle the constant stream of new users who can not seem to make the search function work and ask duplicate questions? See for example "why doesn't my map appear in the right place after I changed the CRS?"

2

We currently have just over 38,500 (23%) of the questions asked here unanswered.

If you think that's too many, then, as a moderator, would you see helping the community to address that number being a priority and, if so, how might you do that?

1

If and when AI answers become frequent, what strategies would you suggest to maintain a human element in knowledge sharing?

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