Parenting Stack Exchange has an opening for a moderator, are you interested?

Question

Due to time and life constraints, I'm sorry to report that Balanced Mama will not be able to continue on as part of the moderation team. She did a fantastic job while she could, and deserves our thanks.

We're looking for someone that is fair, even-handed and consistently awesome in the way that they interact with users. Such a person should be familiar with our theory of moderation and have a few hours per week on average to spend doing moderator things on the site.

Parenting Stack Exchange doesn't see many flags, there aren't very many disputes that creep up which require intervention. Your job as a moderator here will be mostly as an emissary of this community - to help guide new users and help them acclimate to our system. This means leaving helpful comments and occasionally answering questions on our meta site.

Sometimes, the work is janitorial, where you step in with your super powers to help the community do what the community can't - things like larger scale tag cleanups and synonyms. Mostly, you'll just continue to participate as you do now, while keeping an eye out for new folks that might need some extra guidance.

We're very respectful of your time, we just ask that if you're going to be away for an extended amount of time that you let us know, so we can make sure the site is covered.

Does this sound like a position you'd like to hold? Do you feel that someone else might be good for this position and wish to let us know? In the answers below, drop a link to your profile, and a few thoughts that you have on the site and the direction its going. If nominating someone else, drop a link to their profile instead, and a sentence or two about why you think they're ideal for the job.

I hope to have someone appointed by the end of next week, so if you're interested, please don't hesitate to chime in! If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below.

Update

Please welcome your new moderators, anongoodnurse and Rory! They're joining the team today, and I hope you're all as excited as I am to see them dig in to their new roles. Remember, we're all here to learn, so please be patient as they get used to their new positions. I don't think it'll take either of them long.

I'd also like to say a warm, personal thank you to Beofett who has been with this site in his capacity as a moderator from the start. This site would not be what it became without you, and we're truly grateful for your involvement. Please stick around, citizen Beofett - and relax a bit.

Congrats and thanks to all!

Answer 1

I have been active on Parenting SE for 3 and half years now, visiting the site for at least 5 days a week, with 5th highest rep on the site (11k from 271 answers.)

With 3 kids I think I'm reasonably knowledgeable on the subject matter for the site, and have a very practical and no-nonsense approach to parenting. I have also taught children of various ages (sailing, safety etc)

I only actually have 68 helpful flags on this site, but I have been an SE mod for nearly 4 years now - across the Stack Exchange network I currently moderate 6 sites (5 as a pro-tem, and one as pro-tem from beta to graduation and then voted in as a mod) and am very active on quite a few sites, both in reviewing and editing and in questions and answers (current network-wide rep of >150k)

This gives me a reasonable view of differing moderation requirements (Security is reasonably strict, Music is very loose, etc) which I expect to help me in terms of moderating here. I have also had the opportunity of helping moderate a couple of very difficult sites - useful experience!

I also use the chat rooms to ask for others opinions (both mods and community) for feedback, clarity and if I am in any doubt etc) - and more than happy to admit mistakes and fix problems where they happen.

And I'm a firm believer in the use of wider aspects of the Internet (I admin the Security Stack Exchange blog, for example) to drive traffic, grow the visibility of the site, and generally improve the experience. At the stage this site is at, I think this could be very useful.

Time-wise, I understand very well the resource requirements for moderating SE, and I am confident I have ample capacity.

(tl;dr) I'll pop my name in the hat.

My network wide profile

My parenting profile

Answer 2

I am new to Parenting.se, but not to SE in general. My profile at EL&U is shown below.

I am here daily, and am willing to do far more here. Although I'm not sure I meet the criteria of being consistently awesome in the way that I interact with users, I believe I am pretty fair and even-handed. I am very familiar with the SE model and with its theory of moderation.

My background of particular interest to Parenting.SE includes my experience as a parent and my training. I have finished raising my four children, and for the most part, they all turned out pretty well (my oldest is a nurse, my youngest is in medical school, and my tweens are an employed artist and a schoolteacher; all are married.) Parenting decisions have not always been easy, so I can really empathize with people having difficulty. I can look back with honesty on what went well and what didn't.

Professionally, I have a background in western medicine, and I have ~40 years of experience. I have delivered ~100 babies, and cared for them and many, many more children. I am also certified in Mental Illness and Drug Addiction treatment (all ages, effect on family members, etc.) but I am not a psychologist.

I mention western medicine because the model is interventional, so I tend to recommend interventional diagnostics/therapy sooner than many. That doesn't mean medications for everything, however. In my mind, medications are a last resort for behavioral problems of the kind we usually see here. My advice tends towards what I read/use in evidence-based literature, not popular writing, and for that reason my advice tends not to be based on anecdotal evidence but more on the scholarly research available (with full appreciation for the fact that evidence makes it's way into popular writing, and that popular writing and anecdotal evidence is often valuable). But I will not be advocating strict breastfeeding on the basis of nipple confusion. My first was both breast- and bottle-fed without any problems except for the additional work that bottle feeding entails. I make recommendations based on what I've read and seen to be effective in my practice.

What I can offer in addition to the above is a familiarity with different cultures. One of the things I've seen here that I don't think is helpful is judging another culture by our own standards, as seen initially here. If this is a global community (or at least an English speaking one) we will get questions from people with very different cultural norms.

In terms of my vision for this site, I would obviously like to see it grow, I would like to see chat more active, etc., but we need to have more users to see those things occur. I think that providing quality answers that attract users helps most. As such, I am less concerned with what kind of comments are being left or removed, etc. My focus would be on making the site welcoming and easy to use. In many areas, I would follow what the community wants rather than lead in change.

If the above sounds helpful and in keeping with community goals, I would be honored to be considered for moderator.

My badges on EL&U include gold badges for steward (x3), and marshall - for review tasks. I also have a badge for sportsmanship (which shows I upvote good answers regardless of whether I've answered or not).

Finally, as the above should indicate, I am not a programmer nor am I very tech-savvy; I would have shrunk that image if I could!

Answer 3

I'd be willing to step up and become a moderator of Parenting. I'm a programmer, so I'm generally available during the day; while I don't read Parenting during most of that time (hopefully...) I'd be available to answer flags or reply to chats (thanks, SE iPhone app), and as a moderator would check in more diligently than I do now with little difficulty.

My profile: https://parenting.stackexchange.com/users/6524/joe (25 helpful flags)

My SO profile: https://stackoverflow.com/users/1623007/joe (581 helpful flags)

I've been a StackOverflow user for a while now, and have a bit over 20k rep there, so I'm pretty familiar with moderation in general. I'm the only gold badge user in my primary tag, so I do a fair amount of duplicate hunting when I can. I've also got a Steward (for Edits) and the Marshal badge (for Flags) over there, so I'm definitely comfortable with what it takes to do the general site maintenance tasks. I also have several years of forum moderation (not as primary moderator, but as an assistant) under my belt from the last decade or so, so I have a pretty good handle on how to deal with difficult issues and conflicts.

As a parent, I have two little ones, a 3 year old and an 19 month old, who run circles around me and provide lots of fodder for asking questions and answering them. I've also read quite a lot of parenting books, which mostly means I've spent a lot of time reading, but occasionally is useful (both in parenting and in answering questions!).

In terms of improving the site, my biggest concern is that the site is still working out some of the big questions StackExchange sites all have to deal with. What exactly is on topic, how much 'chat' in comments is acceptable, how to ensure the quality questions get attention. I think we need to answer some of these questions before we can grow into a full site, and I'd push harder to accomplish that. I started, actually, a few weeks ago with my question Our Questions Need More Votes; I think that if we can improve the voting habits of our regulars we can acquire and retain users more effectively, and improve our question base.

I'd also like to work out how comments should be used in a little more detail, both with Karl and Beofett, and with the meta community in general. I find that on other StackExchange sites, comments are usually a bit more tightly moderated - sometimes too tightly, but mostly more tightly than here - and that often improves site flow. Parenting is different, but it's not necessarily all that different in this regard; some comment discussion is good, but it's not a discussion site at the end of the day.

I also want to see if I can get more involvement on meta here. We don't have very much right now, in part because there's not all that much going on in meta. I think if we have a few more discussions here, we might get more participation, which would be good in the long term for the site - if we want to get out of beta, it's going to be from the efforts of our users, and that comes in part from discussions on meta.

Finally, I think we need to find a way to get more questions. A site like this seems to acquire permanent members who answer questions, but don't tend to ask questions; the latter seems to come mostly from google traffic and name recognition, which we seem to be lacking (as a young and still small site, that's not surprising). I'd like to see if we can get some more questions, particularly from our regulars. We might not normally be the type to ask for help, but we can if nothing else ask and answer questions to add some traffic to the site - and the question contest proved that there is room for significantly more questions on this site.