path: root/glep-0038.rst

---
GLEP: 38
Title: Status of forum moderators in the Gentoo project
Author: Christian Hartmann <christian.hartmann at email.de>,
        Wernfried Haas <w.haas at xover.htu.tuwien.ac.at>,
        Tom Knight <tomk at gentoo.org>
Type: Informational
Status: Final
Version: 1
Created: 2005-05-06
Last-Modified: 2019-11-07
Post-History: 2005-06-17, 2005-06-28, 2005-10-17
Content-Type: text/x-rst
---


Abstract
========

Global moderators and site admins should also go through the mentoring process
and become official Gentoo staff.

Motivation
==========

At the time of writing the forums are apart from the recruiting process and 
people helping out there are not made an official part of Gentoo. This GLEP
aims on creating and establishing a recruitment and mentoring process for
moderators and site admins of forums.gentoo.org. By doing this we hopefully
achieve a (even) better moderation quality and stop the complaints about
moderators not being staff. Moderators and site admins do not need cvs
access.

Moderators and site admins are doing a hard job for the community as well as all
the other projects do but they get no voice in the gentoo internals. Recent events
such as the election of trustees or the new metastructure poll are effectively
affecting the forums, so the wish to be part of the decision as an equal member 
is present among the moderators.

Moderators are often a contact person between users and developers, so we
should try to improve the communication between these two groups of people. As
moderators are pretty much exposed to the public (forums users, but also used
as contact person for requests that should go to the PR department or the
trustees) they need to have some knowledge about Gentoo's internal structure
as well as contact to the other developers.

The current training process for new moderators works pretty well even though
there are no official guidelines how to do it. As part of this proposal a more
detailed procedure for the training process will be established to make it
more reproducible. It also gives us the possibility to document the things
happening already today in the current training process.

The status of the Gentoo Forums has been undefined for quite some time. Since
it is using the gentoo.org domain it should be considered an official project.
People working on an official project should be developers or staff following Gentoo's
general policy. At the moment the persons with direct access to the database
are developers. Being moderator could be considered an improved forums rank
that does not have impact on Gentoo's infrastructure, but since moderators and
administrators are able to delete, move and edit posts on the forum willingly,
their level of access should be considered developer like. Many users may not
be aware of the difference between moderators and developers, so the actions of a
moderator may represent Gentoo Linux to them anyway.

Specification
=============

To obtain a certain kind of quality assurance and to (create and) ensure that
upcoming moderators know about the forums guidelines a document and processes
will have to be created and established that the recruits need to follow.
This document (called `Moderators handbook/FAQ`_) will include the moderation guidelines 
as they are currently available in the moderators forum plus a FAQ that was created as 
a possible candidate for a forums-quiz. The guidelines and the FAQ should help the 
moderator to get some general information about how to moderate the forums.

Suggested procedure for becoming global moderator: Existing moderators can
suggest a user to become a moderator. The ability of the new moderator to
deal with people in a kind way and to detect misplaced posts, etc usually
also has been reviewed by the other moderators already since they can read
their previous posts and suggestions in the forums feedback threads. If they
accept, they will become moderator on the forums. A bug will be filed on
b.g.o containing information about the new moderator. Afterwards they must
answer the staff quiz that will be revisited by devrel. The quiz then will
be sent to recruiters@g.o for revision. Becoming staff member is not
optional, but mandatory.

The first month is supposed to be a test period, if the moderator
does not do anything in that time or messes up in another way, they will be
restored to their old user status. The mentor(s) and everyone of the forums team
are encouraged to help the new moderator if they are unsure how to deal with a
situation.

Rationale
=========

The process of acquiring new developers seems to work for the rest of Gentoo
Linux quite well. A mentoring system has been chosen since new moderators were
mentored unofficially by the other moderators anyway. This means more or less
writing down things that have been done already.
It was discussed to add a forums-specific quiz to the process of acquiring new
moderators. 
Devrel's standing on that is that it is up to the moderators how a new moderator is 
chosen. Since the old process worked fine so far and some people among the moderators
didn't exactly like the idea of a quiz, we chose not to make one. A document containing the 
questions collected for the quiz in form of a FAQ together with the moderation 
guidelines seems to be a more feasible approach. The new moderators are supposed to 
read the FAQ as well as they had to take a quiz, so they will learn the information 
given in this document.

Backwards Compatibility
=======================

Moderators who are currently inactive (Bodhisattva status) should be
considered akin to retired developers and will have to take the staff quiz
if they return to moderation activities. New moderators should have to go
through the mentoring process in any case as stated above.

Moderators in national forums: In our internal discussion it turned out that not
all moderators in the national forums are able to speak english well, which
would be a requirement to become a staff member. We decided that it would
counter productive to make it mandatory for them. Becoming a staff member is
optional for these moderators.

As a side effect of the discussion about the glep among the moderators 
as well as in discussions with other developers and devrel, it turned
out that the forums have never been assigned to a toplevel project in the 
general organization of the Gentoo project. Forums don't really seem to fit 
into one of the current categories as they are related to the infrastructure
and the documentation project. We suggest putting it in the other category 
or making a separate one for the forums. 

Reference Implementation
========================

- `Moderators handbook/FAQ`_
- `Becoming a developer`_
- `Staff quiz`_
- `Thread on gentoo-dev`_

..  _Moderators handbook/FAQ: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Forums/Forum_guide
..  _Becoming a developer: https://www.gentoo.org/get-involved/become-developer/
..  _Staff quiz: https://projects.gentoo.org/comrel/recruiters/quizzes/staff-quiz.txt
..  _Thread on gentoo-dev: https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/message/df817579a5f741c02717fe238ff30661

Copyright
=========

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0
Unported License.  To view a copy of this license, visit
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/.