Do we know when the first election is due?

Question

In the post Congratulations, you're no longer in Beta! Catija wrote on 2019-08-01:

full-site elections will be delayed but will be scheduled eventually

Do we know anything about the planned timeframe of this eventuality?

To avoid misunderstandings, I'm more than happy with the current moderator team, but from other SE sites I gathered the election is a yearly occurrence.

Answer 1

UPDATE:

I appreciate your patience! The election is scheduled to start September 20th. For more information, see this post.

Great question!

Elections aren't annual, actually. We have some literature that says they're "regular" but that doesn't mean they're on a schedule. We actually run elections when they're needed, in most cases - and we decide they're needed based on when mods step down or when they disappear, which happens from time to time. On some sites like Stack Overflow, that means we may have elections one or two times per year and on smaller sites, we may go five years between elections.

All of that said, this doesn't really apply to y'all since what you're asking about is the first full-site election - what we used to refer to as a site's "Graduation election". These were part of our plan when we rolled out the announcement about the sites leaving beta and it has really been hard that we haven't been able to follow through on that.

The last year has been really complicated for a number of reasons that have caused various delays and greater need for elections across the network. I can go into more detail but the end result is this:

• Elections take a good amount of manual work by CMs, so we try to only have a few elections running at a time.
• A delay in running elections through January and February added to an already large backlog.
• The new moderator agreement is leaving some sites with fewer mods than they need due to mods being absent, taking this time to step down, or declining the agreement.

So, three of the CMs (myself, Cesar and JNat) are working through a list of sites that I have triaged on a presentation board:

The red circle is y'all - those teal sticky notes are sites that I'm going to check in with starting in January. There are a couple of caveats that will decide when y'all actually see an election here:

• how many of the yellow sticky notes become orange. The yellow stickies generally represent sites with fewer than three mods. We generally want sites to have at least three, even if there's not a lot of activity on the site because it leaves room for people to be on vacation or take a break without stepping down completely.
• when the new CM tooling for elections is complete. Right now, we can only run a few elections at the same time because of the amount of work each takes. Once the project to update our tools is complete (it's in progress now), we'll be able to double or triple the number of elections running at a time.

Since y'all have three mods who are generally active, even though you're absolutely owed an election, we made the decision to hold off on it until we've got some of our other things in a good state.

Let me know if you have any other questions!