In the past few minutes we finished our first ever official moderator meeting. At the end of last year we decided to start holding meetings to discuss site business. Some topics have been getting away with us, and there are some decisions that are too big to be made alone.
This is not an attempt to subvert the way things currently work, more an effort to unify our official voice and get more of the mods involved in discussing the problems at hand. Until now, it's been hard to weigh in on something if another moderator has already spoken, but if we don't weigh in, people might get the wrong idea. If we disagree publicly, people get confused about what's most right. That makes it hard to give the direction we're supposed to be oozing.
The idea is we'll meet, discuss what needs discussion and come to a group decision and announce that here on Meta (if it's announceable). Like this.
The meeting today was about the meetings. In attendance: Oli, fossfreedom, Luis Alvarado, jokerdino and jrg.
Quorum size. We decided that the number of people needed to be present should be 4. Bigger is always better but 4 should be fair and achievable.
Voting rules. Majority to pass. Deadlocks can either be passed onto the next meeting or (in urgent cases) we'll pull in somebody from SE to decide what's best.
When and how. Between this meeting and the emails that ran up to it, we're decided that Saturday 1700UTC/GMT is going to be the most available time for most of us. We hold the meetings in our chat room. We'll aim to organise an online whiteboard to track topics. Oli to ask how (or if) other SE sites handle it.
How we let users know what we're talking about. There was a toss up between wanting to be open but also that there is site business we're not allowed to talk about (sharing personal information, for example) and that there are also going to be cases that involve specific named users. We decided for a summary of minutes (like these) that omit anything that's likely going to be unfair or taken out-of-context.
If you'd like clarification on any of those summarised points, feel free to ask in comments or answers below.
