Update - Based on the vote-counts (as of 18/09/15) we have added users Slytherincess and Praxis to the list of room owners for the Mos Eisley chatroom.
If you feel that there is a further need for additional moderators, feel free to raise the issue in a separate Meta.
A big hand and a round of congratulations to our new mini-mods :-P
It was recently suggested by someone of rather large import to the Stack Exchange community that perhaps our beloved chat room needed to have some owners who were not moderators.
Shog9: I think this room needs a couple of owners who aren't mods; the elected mods tend to have their hands full on the main site, while this room could use a few people with kick-mute privileges sorta hanging around.
http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/24144371#24144371
As such, I would like to propose the question: should we have the existing room owners (currently, they are exactly the same as the site moderators) add one or two other users as owners of the room?
The primary tool that room owners will have at their disposal is the ability to "kick-mute" a user in the room. This silences the user and prevents them from speaking in Mos Eisley for a short cool-down period (which scales with subsequent mutes). Note that room owners have no influence over the disposition of flags or chat-wide bans. The main benefit of having extra room owners is that they can manage issues at the room level, before it devolves into a flood off flags that require moderator intervention.
NOTE: This is an informal poll for the community to voice their opinion on people they think would be good in this position. Ultimately it will be up to the existing room owners (i.e. the mods) to appoint, or not appoint, people they trust to the position.
Here are some qualities which the new room owner should have:
- Ability to persuade, and deter conversations
- Not anonymous; so if they tell you to stop what you're doing, you know it's because they are a room owner, and are likely to "kick-mute" you.
- As @shog9 mentions:
the key elements of successful chat moderation are:
1) anticipation of a problem
2) intervention before it becomes a problem
3) guidance to prevent future problems
...of which only #2 really requires special tooling. Hence, kick-mute.