TL;DR: The Community Team has been doing discovery work on the possible creation of new community roles across the Stack Exchange network and individual sites. We started by approaching site moderators, and now we want to hear from the broader community about different roles you would like to see outside the existing site moderator role. This could be anything that you see applying to the network as a whole (which individual communities can choose to fill or not), or a role specific to a particular Stack Exchange site.

Background

For a long time, the only codified community role that we have had on Stack Exchange sites is that of the site moderators. The community contributes to and participates on each site in various ways, but we have rarely provided an official way to recognize the ways in which each user has helped maintain the knowledge base and/or support the rest of the community. As such, we wanted to find ways to give you all more ownership of your respective communities and empower you to shape them further.

What kinds of roles?

Throughout the network's history, the only role designated to the community so far has been the role of site moderator. This is an exercise of exploring what could exist alongside that role to enrich the experience of using the different sites. These could be roles that would exist alongside new tools, opt-in responsibilities, or permissions related to specific badges. The sky's the limit here.

For example, we believe the following could be possible roles to consider:

• Plagiarism Handler – a role centered around reviewing and removing plagiarism from the network
• Deputy Moderators – a temporary role by appointment that would give lower-rep users some early access to reputation-based curation tools
• Event Planner – a role centered around creating and organizing events for their site, community, etc.

Don’t focus too much on these roles in particular; we’re just including them as examples of the different kinds of roles that could be considered. (But if you think one of the above examples would be a good role for us to add, feel free to suggest it as an answer and explain how you think it should work!)

How should I share my suggestions for new roles?

We don’t want the discussion to focus too much on analyzing our existing examples; rather, you should treat this as an open-ended opportunity to brainstorm and identify possible new roles that could help our communities run more efficiently and create a more enjoyable experience for all of you.

If you have an idea for a new community role, please post it as an answer on this post (one suggested role per answer). To make it easier to discuss your ideas, please start each answer with a name for the role as the heading of your answer, followed by a brief description of how you think the role would work (e.g., what permissions it might need, new tools you think it might need, etc.).

December 19th, 2022 is our tentative deadline

You can always propose things on Meta – but as far as this post is concerned, we’ll be accepting suggestions of new community roles until December 19th, 2022. After that, we’ll present and discuss these ideas internally with the rest of the Community Team and other staff. We plan to make a post in early January to share which roles, if any, we will begin exploring in more depth with engineering and product teams.

We can’t promise that your suggestions will all be implemented; the examples we provided are just interesting things that we think could enrich the network experience. Regardless of the outcomes, we think this is an interesting exercise to carry out periodically to continue innovating on the Stack Exchange user experience.