Insufficient nominees for moderator election: What happens next?

Question

Stack Exchange’s position is that every site has a team of moderators to operate in our network. Currently, this community is being moderated by Rory Alsop and AJ Henderson, who have been doing an excellent job. In 2019, Sound Design shed its Beta label along with 28 other SE sites. We attempted to hold the graduation election for your community in July.

While sites are in Beta, elections do not need to be competitive. However, once a site loses the Beta label, elections must be competitive to progress to the voting stage and be considered successful. We define an election as competitive when it has at least one more nominee than available moderator slots. In graduation elections, the Pro-Tem moderators need to nominate themselves again for consideration to continue as full site mods. So for a graduation election to be competitive, there need to be at minimum four nominees since there are three moderator slots.

Unfortunately, we only had the two current moderators nominate themselves, while we require four nominations in total. Members of an SE site being willing to step up as moderators has been the primary threshold for keeping a site alive since we created this policy in January 2015. Without that, a site is in danger of being shut down. Today, I am posting on behalf of the Community Management team to discuss the next election for this site. In order for a future election to be successful, there need to be community members who are eligible to serve as moderators who are willing to step up to the plate.

Next Steps

We are going to recommend waiting until February 2022 before setting up another election for this site. We’ll be looking for additional individuals to nominate themselves as moderators to join the team. This next election will help to bring those folks in. If we can’t find at least four people willing to nominate themselves to be a moderator on this site by that time, the site is at risk of shutting down.

Do you have any questions about the election process, or any concerns keeping you from nominating yourself as a moderator? Let us know, and we’ll do our best to address them.

Answer 1

I'll add, for anyone that is worried it would take too much effort or be too hard or wouldn't be something they were good at. It really isn't hard and doesn't take much time and Rory and I both have lots of experience to help you out. If it's something you think you would find at all interesting, please nominate yourself.

If it's something you want to talk to an existing mod before you consider nominating yourself to ask questions, by all means, feel free to reach out to Rory or I and we can answer your questions. We both are multi-site moderators with a bunch of experience on multiple sites.

Answer 2

I'd be happy to nominate myself, I've got two daughters, so I'm used to mediating squabbles. I've been using SE sites for... (counts fingers) ... years now. I don't think it would take much time because Rory and AJ have handled it great by themselves. I'll probably just ask them if I'm not sure about things anyway.

I would love @Tetsujin to nominate himself - he's a stand-up guy, very knowledgeable, and I've seen him in this and other SE sites for years sharing his wisdom. I think one of the top things you need to be to be a mod is present. And I understand some people can't make that commitment for whatever reason, but at the moment, I can.

I'd be happy to start the ball rolling by nominating myself.

-o__O-