Insufficient nominees for graduation election: What happens next

Question

Stack Exchange’s position is that every site has a team of moderators to operate in our network. Currently, this community is being moderated by Jens Kubieziel and Alexey Vesnin, who have been doing an excellent job. In 2021, Tor left beta with 58 other sites. We attempted to hold the first graduation election in May of 2022 and then another in March of 2023 for your community.

While sites are in Beta, elections do not need to be competitive. However, once a site loses the Beta label, elections must be competitive to progress to the voting stage and be considered successful. We define an election as competitive when it has at least one more nominee than available moderator slots. In graduation elections, the Pro-Tem moderators need to nominate themselves again for consideration to continue as full site mods. So for a graduation election to be competitive, there need to be at minimum four nominees since there are three moderator slots.

Unfortunately, we only had one of the current moderators nominate themselves, while we require three nominations in total. Members of an SE site being willing to step up as moderators has been the primary threshold for keeping a site alive since we created this policy in January 2015. Without that, a site is in danger of being shut down. Today, I am posting on behalf of the Community Management team to discuss the next election for this site. In order for a future election to be successful, there need to be community members who are eligible to serve as moderators who are willing to step up to the plate.

Next Steps

We are going to recommend waiting until October 2023 before setting up another election for this site. We’ll be looking for additional individuals to nominate themselves as moderators to join the team. This next election will help to bring those folks in. If we can’t find at least four people willing to nominate themselves to be a moderator on this site by that time, the site is at risk of shutting down.

Do you have any questions about the election process or any concerns keeping you from nominating yourself as a moderator? Let us know, and we’ll do our best to address them.

Answer 1

The cancelled election in June 2022 had two candidates: Alexey and Jens. The cancelled election in March 2023 had only Alexey.

I wonder if there's a reason why so few of the active users here want to run in the election, especially considering that there's not much competition? Would at least three other people be (including or excluding Jens) be willing to at least consider running in the October 2023 election?

It would be sad to see this site go down, along with Alexey's diamond (he's one of my favorite network-wide diamond moderators). If anyone is interested in running for the election, maybe you can comment or answer here to provide a rough idea of the likelihood of this election meeting the requirements. Personally, I can't run for the election because I don't have enough points on the site.