This process is fundamentally flawed because the moderator removal process is fundamentally flawed.

We're trying to use a reinstatement and appeals process to clean up issues of a lack of fundamental due process in the first instance.

This is not going to build trust; nor will it ensure that the community and the company have a symbiotic relationship.

Take, for instance, the American Justice system (which itself is an evolution of the Magna Carta and fundamental 'common law' rights). It is a justice system that is founded upon a few principles:

• every person going through it is presumed innocent until the process finds them guilty
• They are entitled to counsel to help them navigate the process
• they are entitled to see all evidence against them
• They are entitled to a trial where their peers are judging them; not the power that prosecuted them

Or, more basically, fundamental principles of:

• Impartiality
• Fairness
• Transparency

The interesting part of using a Jury is that it provides a check against the power of the prosecution in another way, Nullification -- the idea that even if the person is guilty of breaking the law, the law itself is unjust.

These are sound principles, present according to the level of due process required by the situation.

Even if you believe that's too much due process for removing a moderator; remember that there has to be a level of due process that shows that the process is transparent, fair, and impartial.

The moderator removal process is not currently transparent, fair, or impartial.

Therefore, this appeals and reinstatement process is fundamentally flawed until you fix the original removal process.

What exactly happens in the ugliest possible case, when the moderator council supports/denies reinstatement, and SE overrides that?

The moderator council is not allowed to make the details public in that case, and in many cases it would probably be unethical to do that anyway. SE is unlikely to make any details public that would harm their case, though hopefully they'd refrain from any negative public comments at all this time. But in the end we'd be pretty close to the mess that triggered the creation of this process in the first place.

What exactly are the moderator council members that have all the information about the case allowed to say publicly? Are they free to say publicly that SE is overriding their decision for their own nefarious goals, without revealing any details in public? Can they make their own conclusions public without revealing the information they're based on?

What happens if the moderator council is split? Is the minority allowed to make their opinion public?

I understand that SE can't put the actual decision into the hands of volunteers in any kind of unconditional way. But having only an advisory role feels too weak to me for the moderator council.

Possible Outcomes

There are several final outcomes for each phase in this process. They are:

• Reinstate with no preconditions - For cases where the former moderator stepped down voluntarily or by inactivity and they have had no concerning behavior in the interim.
• Reinstate with preconditions - For cases where reinstatement is allowed as long as the former moderator agrees to follow guidelines specified by one or more of the groups involved in the process.
• Reinstate with removal expunged - For involuntary removals where it is found in the course of examination that the removal was invalid and the former moderator was not at fault. The CLT will always need to approve this recommendation.
• Do not reinstate, but can run in election on any site - For cases where there is a barrier to reinstatement immediately but there is nothing generally preventing the former moderator from becoming a moderator again in the future.
• Do not reinstate, and can’t run in election on any site - For cases where there are outstanding concerns. The former moderator will need to apply for reinstatement again in the future if they wish to be reinstated or be allowed to run in an election. In extreme cases, the moderator may be permanently banned.

You are missing a very important outcome: Removal expunged without reinstatement.

Moderators who have been removed in error should be allowed to have their removal appealed, and if it was made in error, expunged, without them needing to want to be reinstated (or pretending that they do). Bridges may have been burnt, but that shouldn't stop wrongful judgements being corrected.

What I gather from these discussions as someone who largely stopped coming here:

It may seem silly, but the lynchpin of all of this is that the community wants the company to bindingly cede the decision, be it to a mod council, a vote, what have you.

This is the core of that issue and unless the company binds itself to cede the right to have final say people will not be satisfied with this, now or ever, revisions or no revisions, no matter what else happens.

People don't trust SE to make this decision anymore, and they most likely never will again. Not every loss of trust can be remedied. I don't believe this one is salvageable.

George's answer goes into great detail of why common law is set up the way it is, and what the benefits of the various rights it grants are. But the core point of his answer isn't about common law or justice systems. It's that we're at a point where the absolute rule of SE the company is no longer accepted, and people want rights and protections against their overreach.

Moderators are volunteers not paid employees. They are people who deeply care about their site, who care about the users and ensure standards are upheld and guidelines are respected. The best moderators are loyal to the community's ethos, they are the ones who think twice, and three times, before suspending a user who has a short fuse but will not tolerate cheats, trolls or online bullyism. A moderator's primary aim is to help run the site and see that it thrives and in order to do this with efficacy they will sacrifice their free time. Their reward is a healthy and productive site.

When a former moderator loses their diamond because of accusations of harassment (see second scenario), there is no ‘mod-guild’ or ‘mod-union‘ who can speak in their defence. In this appeal court, they must first defend their actions to a community manager, then to the Community Leadership Team and finally to the mod council. Completely alone. A fairly harrowing and intimidating experience if you ask me. The process might be in the former moderator's favour if they are friends with four or more members of the team and/or council, as their previous encounters will obviously influence the final decision. The situation becomes less than idyllic when the former moderator is from a sparsely populated community, if three or more members have had disagreements with the fired moderator in the past and if the former moderator's first language is not English.

PM1 [Previous Moderator] posts a public apology on the Meta site to the users who were harassed. CM1 and CM2 add on to their recommendation that the PM should also participate in an online Diversity and Inclusion training module.

Who in their right mind would agree to such a public confession or be constrained to participate in a training course if their moderator privileges were wrongly removed in the first place? They either repeatedly violated the COC, in which case they pay the penalty, or they didn't violate any code. A fired moderator who hotly contests the accusations will find it hard to defend themself against three or more documented instances.

This reinstatement process, which claims to be transparent and equitable, is unnecessarily complicated; especially when it involves moderators who resigned last year out of principle but in the interim earned a network suspension or when a much admired and respected moderator is suddenly, and arbitrarily, demodded in public. Does this remind us of anyone? Nevermind, s/he who shall not be named (at least by the Stack Exchange staff) should not have lost their diamonds to begin with. To be clear, the updated and more transparent process was created precisely because of what happened between September and December 2019.

Users are more wary and suspicious today then they were before September 2019. And with good reason. Did the former mod earn back their six diamonds? No. Did the moderator(s) who resigned in support of the former, but received a week/month/year long suspension, get reinstated when they applied? No. Are these former moderators missed? Some of them, yes. Most noticeably today, I see fewer posts eloquently written by moderators from across the network disagreeing or disputing CMs and staff's actions and decisions. Why? [Rhetorical question]

And by the way, is the online diversity and inclusion course also obligatory for CMs and staff members? Will the community be informed of the results of the course undertaken by staff members or reinstated moderators? If there is increased transparency, let's see it.

Addendum July 6, 2020

In light of Journeyman Geek♦'s most recent post, here are my unsolicited thoughts on the matter. Where Monica's unique case is concerned, the company should just sweep aside the stale reinstatement procedure and just give back her diamond on Mi Yodeya. It may only be one diamond out of six, but it's the one closest to her heart, whose loss caused her the most hurt. Moreover, the community wants to believe in the company's good will to amend the wrongs committed in the past, so that everyone can begin rebuilding that lost trust. Monica's return, if she accepted the unconditional offer, would represent that turning point.

Considering the subject matter - I'd like it to be clear that I'm speaking for myself, not the mod council (and should this matter reach them, I'd recuse myself), not the MSE moderators (and I will work with them should we get that far on the best outcome)

I'm kinda spread thin trying to deal with multiple people not being all that co-operative and when things are too knotted to undo, sometimes it better to cut the knot - so here we go.

I've been trying to get Monica to go through the appeal process. There's issues - there's a certain lack of trust, as she's expressed before, with the process being delayed by a good many things.

In my conversation with her - I've been put under the impression that she thinks she's already appealed, previously. There's been public complaints on her part of a lack of communication. As such I'd like to ask if there had been previous appeals, still left pending, if they would go under the current framework, and if so, what would be the process to restart it under this.

There's active, ongoing damage to the community - and nearly every decision gets second guessed cause "what about Monica" - in my role as an active community member and a moderator this is difficult. The problem is no one wants to make the first move to do something about it.

I've been trying to mediate, but that needs the parties to talk to each other directly, in good faith and a position of trust. I've made the first move, hopefully but there's only so much I can do.

I do hope one of the other parties involved will pick things up and help resolve what's been a terribly dark time for the community.

My complaint about this is the same as it was before: Monica was fired without due process, against the will of the community that elected her in the first place, and for a reason that no longer applies. The reinstatement process doesn't address that case.

I submit a frame challenge to this entire political exercise:

Formalizing the ways in which the previous mod requesting reinstatement can see the claims against them and be able to respond to them (at multiple points during the process).

The fact that this is even a conceivable bullet point is an explicit acknowledgment that the formal policy is to shoot first and ask questions later. Perhaps SE misunderstood when members of the community have expressed enthusiasm for using Kafka to run business processes. Any talk of "revising the reinstatement process" that presumes the banned mod hasn't even been told what thoughtcrimes have been alleged seems like an active attempt at obeying Muggeridge's Law:

We live in an age in which it is no longer possible to be funny. There is nothing you can imagine, no matter how ludicrous, that will not promptly be enacted before your very eyes, probably by someone well known.

Such an attempt at evasion and misdirection should not be engaged with by the community.

So a couple of points.

This and the previous iteration of the mod-removal processes are complicated. There's a few checks in this case (Staff, whether in the community leadership team, mod team or the CM team)

At least in theory - the "complexity" of the process means it isn't possible to railroad a mod out of office, as has happened in the past, in short notice, even if you're high up in the company. I hope this is an outcome, and I hope twice as hard I'll never have to find out.

The mod council doesn't have the power to overrule the CLT - on the other hand, at this point, multiple people have had to make a case for removing the mod in question and I feel like it is in the best interests of the moderator community to push the company hard on any request for reinstatement that might be denied for anything that doesn't feel like a cast iron reason.

I've personally felt, and still do feel that the moderator council represents the moderator community, but we're not some sort of super-moderator. With at least the current iteration - its possible we don't see eye to eye on quite a few topics, but that's natural. I suspect should we get called to review a moderator reinstatement, you'll get an answer most of the council members reviewing can accept, even if its not their ideal.

And here's a critical thing. The biggest strength the community has is the ability to work together. I might not personally like someone, but damn if I see them get shafted for something they didn't do, or a misunderstanding. If there's the slightest possibility of a misunderstanding, or worse, intentional malfeasance to remove a moderator, I hope which ever moderator council members are in office at the time, and even staff do their best to make it right. This hasn't always been the case (and I have no idea how complicated making things right will be now for some past cases), but I hope it will be for future cases.

Eh, okay I have a problem with this part of scenario 2 right here:

Following their deliberation, they agree with the recommendation of the CM team and the CLT.

The way this is written makes the Mod Council sound less like a community representative and more like "yes men". What happens if the Mod Council rejects the recommendation of the CM team and the CLT? Is reinstatement still denied, or does the PM get reinstatement?

This is a critical question because if the Mod Council is supposed to represent the Community in this process, but you reject and override their decision, is the Community truly represented in this process? I for one don't think so.

I'm sure this isn't necessarily intentionally worded like this. But you need to address this. Otherwise, this just feels pointless.

Seeing as how removal expungings are now on the table, it should be possible for additional parties to initiate the appeal process for any involuntary removal that occurred before this process was followed. It shouldn't require the former moderator themselves. That is, the Mod Council, the Current Mod Team of the former mod's site, Community Managers, and the Community Leadership Team, should all be able to request a formal appeal if they think a mod was in the past removed unjustly.

Scenario 1 seems to cover the most uncontroversial reinstatements, where the Previous Moderator (PM) resigned voluntarily. One of the steps involves "CM1 reaches out to the current Mod team on the site for which PM is requesting reinstatement to see if they have any objections.". What happens if the mod team objects?

• Does this flip the PM to Scenario 2?
• Does this result in a retroactive moderator removal proceeding (i.e. the moderator's previous voluntary resignation is voided and they are brought up on formal moderator removal "charges", the disposition of which determines how the reinstatement proceeding will run)?
• Does the restoration happen anyway, but a Moderator Action Review Process is started immediately afterwards to seek involuntary removal?
• Is there a separate "Scenario 1 contested" proceeding, more in-depth than an uncontested restoration but less onerous than a Scenario 2 proceeding?
• Is the requirement to consult with the current moderators simply a pro forma social ritual not intended to result in actual objections (e.g. "ok moderators, when I ask you for any objections, I'm not asking for your personal opinions or assessment of the PM, but only whether you are aware of any extremely grave reasons why they should not be allowed back, like maybe if they are an active serial killer or something.")?

I don't expect this kind of thing will happen often, but it is plausible that it could. This could happen in a few ways:

• A PM resigned voluntarily under honorable circumstances (e.g. reduction in available time to commit to moderation, loss of interest in moderation, a philosophical or policy disagreement not resulting in misconduct, etc.), but then later developed a reputation as a "problem user". I recall something like this actually happening, with a voluntarily-resigned PM (name omitted to avoid stirring up past drama) later posting some inflammatory stuff that got him an actual Suspension from the site he used to moderate.
• A PM resigned under apparently honorable circumstances, but a prior act of moderator misconduct surfaced after the resignation was complete (e.g. a moderator resigned in 2019, the resignation was accepted, but it was discovered in 2020 that the moderator engaged in abusive suspensions in 2017 and wronged users are now demanding justice).
• A PM was involved in a dispute or controversy surrounding their moderatorship, but preemptively resigned before formal moderator removal proceedings could be started. This happens semi-frequently in politics, where a politician under investigation for alleged misconduct will resign rather than face the ordeal of impeachment proceedings (e.g. Richard Nixon).

Traditionally the removal and reinstatement processes were CM lead, and unless the moderator in question made a request to make it public it was not.

Right now, with the current checks and balances in place, there's at least 4 different sets of people, CMs, CLT, Mod council and local mods.

I believe radical openness and transparency to the parties involved is essential and critical for any process to work. However, in the case of a broader community, there's risk of fall out - both to other parties uninvolved in the direct issues and those who are, as well as a certain aspect of curiosity that is sometimes not productive.

Is the "defacto" policy of "We do not discuss removals and reinstatements without express permission of the moderator" in question still in place? In theory, in the case of a contentious removal - is it possible for a moderator to choose exactly how much information they would have revealed?

On the other hand - should a moderator choose to talk about it, is there a plan in place to what the company will and won't talk about?

Likewise how would this extend to non employee stakeholders - the mod council and local mods should they get involved?

The process as written offers the PM multiple opportunities to add context to their request. This is clearly appropriate and necessary to protect the PM from the process, but it also means the process can potentially drag on for a very long time (in Yaakov Ellis's scenario #2, five weeks) as we need to keep going back to the current mod team and asking for further input. While the process does not explicitly say so, it's also plausible that the CM/CLT position might evolve in response to whatever the PM says (which could create the appearance of impropriety, under some circumstances).

My compromise is this: the PM should be provided with the opportunity to fully develop their request as early as possible, to minimize unnecessary back-and-forth between the PM and the CMs/CLT. In other words, this step should be more than a mere formality:

Before finalizing recommendation, CM1 reaches out to the PM to provide any relevant clarifications regarding PM’s initial email’s content (surrounding their removal, for instance) and to request any missing context that may be needed in response to the data uncovered by CM1 (added to documentation if it exists).

CM1 should have an open and honest conversation with the PM, including any context that can reasonably be shared with the PM, and this conversation should continue until the PM has had a reasonable opportunity to explicitly respond to each piece of evidence. If there is uncertainty as to whether some important information can be shared with the PM, it may be appropriate to bypass CM review and jump directly to a CLT escalation (so that we can have a firm answer to that question immediately, and avoid "ambushing" the PM with new evidence at a later stage in the process). The end result should be that the PM's position is fully developed and documented, and does not need to be further clarified or expanded upon later. The PM would still be permitted to do so, of course, but this should rarely be necessary.

Finally, if any evidence cannot be shared with the PM, the CLT should only consider that evidence for the purposes of a CLT veto (and nobody else should consider it at all). If the company is going to withhold evidence from the PM, then it should give up the pretense of holding a fair process and just call it a veto. I do not dispute that this will occasionally be necessary (e.g. if the PM has engaged in a campaign of targeted harassment against one or more complainants, whom the company does not wish to name), but in my opinion, it's better to call a veto a veto than to pretend to hold an appeals process that won't actually let the PM respond to allegations against them. If you truly do not trust the PM with some piece of evidence, then you do not trust them to become a mod again (mods have access to lots of private information), so you've already made up your mind.

Consider allowing the past moderator to involve the moderator council earlier-on (bypass the first escalation) if they desire to do so.

I can imagine cases where a moderator wants to appeal to the moderator council directly instead of first going for a "second run" with the same parties involved. The process for the first appeal seems very similar to the initial reinstatement process, and that's not always desirable.

I think allowing the past moderator to skip the first escalation and allowing them to directly escalate to the council will both expedite the process in some cases and result in fewer frustrations (the moderator team being asked again while nothing has changed, the past moderator receiving the same rejection). Especially if the moderator team opposes reinstatement and the CMs don't.

Do not reinstate, but can run in election on any site - For cases where there is a barrier to reinstatement immediately but there is nothing generally preventing the former moderator from becoming a moderator again in the future.

1. Can you elaborate generally on the wisdom of this option above? Why allow someone to run for election again if their reinstatement was denied?

   It's my understanding that denial of reinstatement is only for a situation where the CM team or the Mod team definitely does not want a former moderator to have that position again.

   In other words, denying a reinstatement is for when you strongly believe team cohesion would suffer/fall apart, systems/access would be abused (perhaps even legal lines crossed), the community/brand would be harmed, or other egregious risks.

2. And specifically, what kind of scenario would present a barrier to reinstatement now but not later?

   The only thing that I can think of that would make a former moderator not OK now but OK later is if they can't make the time commitment now, but that doesn't make sense here because then the moderator shouldn't/wouldn't be reapplying for reinstatement at this time.

Some concrete suggestions regarding Moderator removal and reinstatement:

1. You have to separate the description of the scenario (= what had happened earlier) and the procedure. This is especially problematic in Scenario 2 - I just don't understand what the procedure is, nor how the bullets relate. (It might not be a bad idea to use a numbered list with "if X read Y1 else read Y2" lines.)
2. Treat appeals and requests separately and differently. An appellant claims that the removal was faulty/illegitimate/etc. and should be undone; a petitioner does not contest the removal procedure, but wishes to be pardoned, or granted leeway etc. Those are quite different.
3. In scenario 2 there needs to be some mechanism of appeal to a wider crowd. Something like - if a PM secures the support of X% of current moderators, they are automatically reinstated unless, say, Y% of the current moderators object to the reinstatement within a given period of time - and Y% needs to be higher than X%.
4. Same goes for scenario 1. If a couple of mods happen to dislike the PM, that should not prevent the reinstatement.
5. In scenario 2, "specifically: questionable access" should read "a specific example: questionable access", right?
6. Drop the Code of Conduct. It lays out a foundation of arbitrary and faulty-process handling of many issues, which underlies moderator removal and potential reinstatement. (It could theoretically be replaced with something else, but that would be a drawn out process all in itself; its removal it simple and would improve the situation greatly.) Particularly, it will preclude bad-faith reasons for moderator removal which are now legitimized and, well, codified.
7. More keeping-of-transparent-records in procedures of removal appeals.

(I may add one or two point later if I have time to read the removal procedure.)

More generally - I agree with @GeorgeStocker's answer.

Like the previous attempts at dealing with this situation, this seems to completely miss the point.

Moderators are elected by the "public" (the community) at large. They are SE's equivalent of a publicly elected official.

So late last year, SE's employees "fired" a moderator--essentially equivalent to a local police chief deciding to throw the city mayor (i.e., the publicly elected official) in jail, because the mayor had the temerity to ask about how a new "law" would actually work in practice.

In December of 2019, that was a bad idea, and a lousy thing to do.

But now it's mid-July 2020. We've just had weeks of protests and riots against police departments. And SE comes out with a policy essentially proclaiming: "We are the police, and as the police, we have the right to fire the mayor, and if that mayor wants their job back, they can come begging to us on their knees, and if we feel like it, we might decide to restore them to their former position."

This is a bad policy, and it's hard to imagine a worse time SE could have chosen to try to impose it.

I'll repeat: a moderator is a publicly elected official. Better still, their election uses ranked voting and no electoral college. As such, their selection honestly reflects the will of the community.

That being the case, I would suggest that dismissing a moderator should be taken extremely seriously. At minimum, I would suggest that:

1. A normal SE employee can (at most) suspend, not dismiss a moderator--and even suspension should require somebody in a director or C-level position.
2. A moderator can only actually be fired by a majority vote of the board of directors.
3. Any such suspension will automatically trigger an investigation, unless the suspended moderator specifically requests otherwise.
4. The investigation will be carried out by an independent third party.
5. The investigator will be given complete access to all SE's records of the incident.
6. The moderator is innocent until proven guilty.
   • If the investigator fails to send "charges" to the board within 30 days, the suspension is lifted automatically.
   • If the board fails to vote to remove within 30 days, the suspension is lifted automatically.
   • the investigator is equally able to refer "charges" against SE employees as against the moderator.

Yes, I realize that may sound to many employees as if I'm making a mountain out of a molehill. Moderators aren't even real employees, just volunteers.

Get that idea out of your head. Moderators are publicly elected officials, and employees are basically hired guns.

This "mayor" may not be able to directly fire the police chief--but the police can't be allowed to throw the mayor into jail, and sentence the mayor as a criminal without trial.