TL3/TL4 instead of more moderators in Project Discussion

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During the merge phase we were talking about finding moderation volunteers and increase the amount of moderators in discourse. This makes totally sense on ask.fedora. But when it comes to the Project Discussion (and maybe some other categories too), more moderation is not really necessary imho.

Instead, I think this category is more or less designated for promoting self-organization with TL3 & TL4. There is much more discipline around compared to ask.fp, and the teams who organize themselves consolidate sufficient experience and eligibility for self-organization. However, it still happens that they need to ask others to, e.g., split a topic or things like that.

I would like the idea that the Project Discussion is self-organized by those teams that use discourse for their internal organization instead of “separating” moderation from them.

This leads of course to the problem: more or less none of them is able to even achieve TL3 (due to the amount of posts, likes, and so on), which excludes them from getting the incentives to “discover the self-organization capabilities” of discourse (which includes becoming aware of TL3 promotion and demotion and the related value of, e.g., likes) that go along with the trust level promotions (… and demotions): at the moment, TL3/TL4 developments and incentives are more or less not possible / not existent for Project Discussion people.

However, before discussing if it makes sense to focus on providing/increasing incentives towards self-organization instead of more moderation, the question is if that is possible?

Because of ask.Fedora, it does not make sense to reduce the requirements for TL3/TL4 in general since they are appropriate for there. But is it possible to add additional possibilities for the teams in project discussion to enter the TL2 → TL3 → TL4 development? From a technical point of view, I assume the most realistic implementation would be to use different TL3 requirements in the two categories. But I don’t know if discourse supports that? Or some other ideas?

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About to board a plane, but I like where you’re going with this. More later.

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I know it is not a best practice to push old topics, but given the recent experience with the data collection proposal (where we saw the Project Discussion category to have an amount of posts sometimes even above the ask.Fedora category), I think it is worth to push a second incentive to discuss approaches that foster self-organization within the Project Discussion category in order to less rely on moderators (and to reduce the moderators’ work load).

I did a little moderation in the initial days (I saw the Thoughts about the earlier proposal topic became itself an interesting discussion :stuck_out_tongue: ) but my schedule did not allow me to keep supporting the moderators. However, when (super roughly) skimming the topics, I thought that some more people with TL3 and/or TL4 would have been a well complement. Not just to intervene/moderate but also because TL3 and TL4 foster experiences that make people to discuss in a more disciplined way and to passively trigger others to do the same (decreasing the need for interventions and such)

This is not about my approach/suggestion above, but about any approach/suggestion that might foster self-organization.

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Will you happen to be at Flock? I’ve proposed a session to talk about building a formal Fedora Discussion Team.

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It’s in the back of my mind but it is not yet clear if my schedule will
allow it. I guess I will know by the end of next week.

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Unfortunately, I won’t be able to make it to Flock.

… but looking forward to the thoughts from the session :wink:

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Speaking of TL3, I was looking at my scoreboard and I noticed that the requirement for all-time posts read is 500 but the last 100 days requirement is 2500. That seems…backwards.

Is it intentional? If so, is it a one-off change or part of a planned set of requirements?

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It’s an artifact. The 100 days requirement default is actually “25% of posts, with a cap of 20,000”. I dropped that to “20% of posts with a cap of 2500”.

I think part of the problem comes from merging in Ask. I want to account for people who read a lot of either Ask Fedora or Project Discussion without both, without lowering the threshold too much. (25% of either seems fine, but… there’s no way to do that.)

Anyway, I’m very open to tweaking these numbers!

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Expanding on that a bit, I’m not sure it’s possible for someone to earn TL3 or TL4 without participating on the Ask side frequently. Maybe that’s okay, because we have other ways to elevate privileges on the Project Discussion side, but it’s definitely an imbalance that we should be considerate of.

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Probably not with the settings we have currently. I’d like to delay this until after Flock, because there’s a lot of other things to think about in the next few days, but we can both

  1. tweak the numbers, and
  2. ask Discourse if they have any clever ideas about the combined-sites-balance.

For what it’s worth, there are currently 22 TL4 members and at 20 TL3[1]. There are 668 at TL2[2], and 5514 at TL1[3]. That makes a TL1:TL2:TL3 ratio of about 275:35:1. Or: 11.4% of people who are at least TL1 are TL2, and 0.3% are TL3.

I think that’s probably too low for TL3… there are probably some interesting data explorer queries that would help figure out the right values, but I will not let my brain distract me with that right now. :classic_smiley:

  1. who are not also TL4 ↩︎

  2. again, not including the higher ones ↩︎

  3. same again ↩︎

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I think the only way to involve Project Discussion reliably in TL3+ is to have a second way to gathering TL3.

Only ask.fedora participation can currently make TL3. Since the self-organization is thus not yet present in Project Discussion, people at Project Discussion do also not work much with the like buttons, which makes it even more unlikely that Project Discussion users get incentives towards TL3+ self-organization.

However, I am not a fan to reduce the requirements for TL3 to a level where this promotion gets realistic in Project Discussion (this would need a strong lowering of requirements): such a level would promote too many users in ask.fedora too early to TL3.

Beyond the capabilities to make some changes, TL3 also grants rights to moderation areas and related information. This is imho a privilege that can be abused and that needs some basic understanding of how things work in order to interpret related information. At the same time, TL3 remains a major means of transparency because it enables the users to promote people to the moderation area without the consent with moderators/TL4, giving the users also security and confirmation that people in moderation do not abuse their means because they cannot control who gets involved, which fosters trust. I think this transparency and power limitation is important for our way of organization and to keep trust. Thus we need to keep the independent “self-determination” of TL3.

Matt, you said you already made an automation that people who have a group membership get automatically TL1 (or was it TL2?). Maybe we can use something like this to find a second way to get TL3? So, TL3 requirements that apply to people with a group membership (such as Docs)?

E.g., if someone keeps organizing a team’s weekly meeting for some periods → e.g., illustrative requirement for Docs: user has a Docs membership AND user creates at least once per week a topic with docs tag AND ( topic gets at least one reply from another Docs member OR another post that adds the links to the meeting minutes / full logs of the meeting is posted in the topic).

Even if it cannot be fully implemented in an automated manner, we might create rules that can be verified by anyone (which means, anyone can verify that a user who was promoted fulfills the requirements and vice versa) and where the affected user (once fulfilling the requirements) just needs to inform a moderator to promote them to TL3 or so. I mean, this would not create much work if it is limited to users who are members of a group.

… Just some illustrations that might create incentives for Flock discussions since I cannot attend myself :wink: It makes indeed sense to wait for the outcome of the discussions at Flock before making any decisions.

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I totally forgot about that :smiley: Do we have some incentives from Flock? I am curious :wink:

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The defender or TL4 became a mod themselves XD