There's no minimum-tenure in this community to nominate yourself - sometimes new people have the best perspective. What I need to see is that you really care about this community and see value in what it has been and what it could be. Admins aren't currently elected in this community - the current members of the admin team will pick who will join the team with the input of the rest of the community. There's also not a minimum or a maximum number of admins - though I'm looking to significantly grow the team, so I'm hopeful many of you will throw your hats in.
To apply, please submit a nomination for yourself, or even someone else, here. No GitHub experience needed - just create a free account, then click that link, which will give you a form to fill out. From there, others in the community can see all the nominations, react, and comment on them (note that this process also makes it easier for us to recycle this process in the future!). If you submit a nomination for someone else, we'll contact them and request that they go add comment on it, so we can get their perspective. We know also that we get a more diverse admin team when people are asked directly to join, so I've been reaching out to people and may submit some nominations for some of you there so the broader community can see. Though currently dominated by members in the US and Canada, we still want this to be a global community and hope to get a team who live in many counties.
If you don't want to create a GitHub account - it's greatly preferred on our end for managing this process - please join #admin-nominations and start a thread where you answer the questions that are on the form. We will likely post your nomination as a GitHub issue ourselves to keep everything centralized.
This document describes the roles that admins of this community take on. We don't typically do all of these things, but each admin does some of these.
- Send account invites to join the community
- Maintain our various bots
- Remove spam, enforce code of conduct
- Guide updates to code of conduct when necessary
- Maintain an active presence in the community to welcome new people
- Website updates, document updates
- Domain registration and renewal
- Plan additional fun community events (such as AMAs - we haven't done these in a long time though, but an admin could).
- Prune the channel list when it gets large, help identify and consolidate subcommunities to reach critical mass
- Maintain a community archive
- Any other work that improves the community
Most of the time, not much - maybe 10 minutes a week. When things get busier, or if we have more we want to do, it could be a few hours a week, depending.
- Adding formal governance rules (how often should admins rotate or be nominated, what processes do we use to add them). Currently this is decided by each current group.
- Updating the code of conduct
- Considering channel structure
- Deploying a new community Discourse site
- Coordinating with other spatial groups to create a healthy and independent community of spatial professionals
- Bot revival, if someone wants to take it on
- Community survey
- Something else? Tell us what you want for the community