This isn't nearly the comprehensive plan I've been alluding to posting for the last few weeks, and you have my apologies for that. I'm still engaged in email tag with a few very busy folks (more on that later), and have been neck deep in the ongoing tag cleanup effort that we have underway.
I do, however, have some points that I'd like to announce, and thought that folks would appreciate getting 2/3 of a plan rather than another week of radio silence. I'll get straight to the point(s).
We're going to appoint two additional moderators, from the Social Sound Design core.
Andrew and Iain are incredibly awesome, but incredibly busy people. In order to not block what would likely be more productive moderators, they're going to be hanging up their diamonds (but not stepping completely down), at least for the foreseeable future. Make no mistake, they're moderators for life on Sound SE and if they choose to return we'll reinstate them.
In order to have a fully balanced moderation team so that both previous communities that have become one have all interests equally represented in how the site is moderated, I'll be putting out a call for volunteers early next week.
We're going to ramp up the tag cleanup effort so that our software works better for all.
Many of the complaints I've received here on meta, via email from folks that reached out to me and via chat have revolved around seeing a lot of questions that aren't of any interest to the user. This will get better as we hammer down the tag cleanup - as the system sees you simply using the site, when tags have been made sensible, you'll start seeing a lot more of stuff that you answer and vote on and less of the stuff that you don't. We're about 1/3 of the way there, I'm going to start some initiatives to try and get through the rest very quickly.
There are other things that we might be able to put into play to enhance this, and I'm going to speak with our developers about some possibilities.
To be clear, the goal remains to make Sound Design a more open and inclusive site. Sound engineers have interesting questions to ask which many can benefit from, the reverse of this is also true. Discussions are now ongoing here on meta regarding where the bar should be placed in terms of scope, and I fully expect that these will bear fruit soon after some additions to the moderation team have been appointed.
There is more, however I'm still working on things and will have to post a few more points separately - but I wanted to get this much out since it has been a while since I promised to do so. We're not slacking, this just takes time.
Answers are of course open to any constructive thoughts or suggestions that you have.
Update 4/16/2014
I am aware that some time has passed, as soon as we get this taken care of, I'm going to be giving this my undivided attention, which should hopefully be the end of this week.
