I believe moderation guidelines and policy from the Fedora Council would best enable volunteer contributors to succeed in asynchronous community leadership roles. I also suggest opening this type of role to Fedora Advocates.
As I see it, moderation guidelines and policy by the Fedora Council is a “best practices” community management guide written with the Fedora Code of Conduct in mind. Given the CoC is an abstract policy, the moderation guidelines/policy are a concrete implementation of what managing a community in the spirit of the Fedora CoC looks like. Adding more admins today solves the current challenge but that does not scale, and creates a different problem instead (free-range moderation).
In an isolated experiment moderating for a very large forum community, I found behavioral guidance explaining how to react to different kinds of behavior and framing justified responses from a moderator as useful tools. They were effective at lowering moderator stress and held moderators accountable to a more transparent and open standard (also decreasing resistance with troublemakers). It also decreased on-boarding fatigue for new community moderators.
Additionally, Advocates are a large, distributed group of contributors with lower barriers of entry. CommOps is a small, more narrow group of contributors with a higher barrier of entry. Integrating community leadership roles into Fedora Advocates acknowledges and appreciates this type of community contribution and encourages people already doing this type of work to engage directly upstream.
Including the role of community management to Fedora Advocates widens who is included. Moderation guidelines and policy from the Fedora Council potentially helps “downstream” Fedora user / contributor communities build healthy communities that adhere to the spirit of the Fedora CoC, since the current CoC is a value statement, not an instructional policy.
What do y’all think? I am thinking cautiously about maintenance of something like this Discourse site and what kind of a commitment that requires at the volunteer level.