Welcome to the very first MEEP (Moderation Engagement and Enactment Process)!
About MEEPs
MEEPs are official comment periods where moderation proposes and solicits feedback on various potential moderation policies. Moderation MEEPs should not be confused with other obviously common MEEP-expressions, such as "mediocre endive-eating porpoises," "marooned episodic echidnas and platypuses," "mad ecumenical equine prophets," "mesmerizingly enervated egregious parmesan," or even "mega-erotic emphysema patients." No, MEEP definitely means Moderation Engagement and Enactment Process, and is tons better than Max's silly DERP process. It's MEEP-tastic!
Anyhow, as I said, MEEPs will be periodically instigated by moderation in order to gain community feedback on various policy options and to obtain the community's approval or disapproval of those policy options. This will ensure that the site usership will have the opportunity to democratically weigh in on moderation policies. In order to ensure that the result of any MEEP process reflects the will of a substantial number of community members, for a specific MEEP result to be binding, at least 10 users must have expressed a preference on the policy in question, and more than a majority of participants must be in agreement. That means, in a MEEP with 10 voters, the minimum threshold for a binding result is 7-3; similarly, a in MEEP with 19 voters, the minimum threshold for a binding result is 11-8. Again, this ensures that the outcome of the process reflects the consensus of a significant number of site users. If a MEEP result is not binding/valid, moderation will maintain the pre-MEEP status quo, whatever that happens to be. MEEP commentary periods will be open for feedback for at least two days, and may be switched a read-only mode shortly after that period in order to signal a clear end to the MEEP process. MEEPs will be broadcast using the site's announcement feature to ensure maximum awareness.
This is the rough outline for the MEEP process we have developed with an eye to ensuring any result reflects a wide consensus of opinion. However, we will use this MEEP to kill two birds with one stone by asking you to provide feedback on the MEEP process itself. Should it be a simply majority? Should it have a participation threshold? Should its results be binding or advisory? Please let us know your thoughts.
Voting Policy Discussion
This MEEP is specifically about voting policy. The question moderation wants to put before the community is whether there should be a laxer opt-in standard that debaters can have applied to vote moderation on their debates. Such an opt-in would likely need to be agreed to explicitly by both debaters and would only impact the voting standards themselves, not other vote-related rules.
A laxer alternative might look something like this:
- To award argument points, the voter must (1) analyze the argument they found most important, (2) explain who is winning that argument and why.
- To award sources points, the voter must (1) offer a comparative statement about the quality of each side's sources, or note that one side did not use sources while the other did, and (2) point to a specific good or bad source.
- To award spelling and grammar points, the voter must (1) offer a comparative statement about the quality of each side's spelling and grammar and (2) point to a specific instance of poor spelling and grammar.
- To award conduct points, the voter must (1) offer a comparative statement about the conduct of each side, and (2) point to a specific act of misconduct by a particular side
This is just a loose sketch, and so in addition to asking whether such an opt-in should exist, moderation is also asking what such an opt-in should look like were it to exist. Also, what should debaters have to do to opt-in to the standards? Again, please let us know your thoughts.
Select Winner
Also, as a bit of a side-issue, there is now a select winner feature. Moderation is planning on just using the current "argument points" standards to moderate select winner votes. Does anyone feel that a standard unique for the select winner feature needs to be created? Please let us know your thoughts.
Happy Holidays :)