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 Luke Sawczak, Reyedy, and Tsundoku, who have been doing an excellent job. However, since two of them announced their intention to step down soon, we attempted to hold a moderator election over the past few weeks to replace them.
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. The French Language Stack Exchange site shed its Beta label in 2019 (along with 28 other SE sites), and we held a "graduation" election for your community in 2020. As a result, the current election would have needed to be competitive as well in order to proceed to the voting stage.
We define an election as competitive when it has at least one more nominee than available moderator slots. Since two of the current moderators were stepping down, we spoke with the current mods and agreed to hold a 2-slot election – so for this election to be competitive, there needed to be at minimum three nominees, since there were two open moderator slots.
Unfortunately, we only had two users nominate themselves, while we require three nominations in total. This would have resulted in a failed election. However, after we spoke with the current moderators about the likelihood that the election would fail, Tsundoku graciously agreed to stay on as a moderator for now to ensure that the site would have sufficient moderation.
Today, I am posting on behalf of the Community Management team to discuss what will happen with the current moderator election, as well as plans regarding holding another election for this site.
We'll be canceling the current election for now. However, we're planning to hold another election with 1 open moderator slot (to replace Reyedy) in a few weeks. In order for an 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. If at least two users nominate themselves in that election, it will successfully proceed to the voting phase – we hope the nominees from this election will nominate themselves again next time, but we want to encourage everyone else who's interested to do so as well.
It's important that your community participate in the election process. If you have any questions about this process, or any concerns keeping you from nominating yourself as a moderator, please let us know by posting an answer below – and we’ll do our best to address them. If you're planning to nominate yourself in the upcoming election, feel free to mention that in an answer as well.
I've now scheduled the election to be rerun as a 1-slot election, with question collection starting on July 18 (and nominations opening a week later).
