Should we change our name to make implicit that our scope goes beyond mere moderation?

Question

On chat per a moments ago, we were having a discussion about the choice of "Moderators" as our site name, and what implications does this have to our scope. Right now, the name implies that this site is for moderation questions that moderators have, yet the tour gives a broader scope including community building, administration, seeding, etc. which are proper of the people trying to managing digital communities in general, in which moderation is a sub-set of all of that.

Shouldn't our naming be more explicit to reflect this? What name you propose?

Answer 1

Moderation is not reserved to moderators. Stack Exchange is a prime example of this: even though user contributions retain their authorship, moderation activities such as editing and deleting other people's contributions are not reserved to the handful of users called “moderators”, but can be performed by any sufficiently experienced user. On Stack Exchange, one set of moderation tools is called “moderator tools”, and this isn't the one that's reserved to the moderators. Even “Moderation” would be an improvement on the name “Moderators”.

There's more to making a community work than moderation. Our description currently reads “question and answer site for community managers, administrators, and moderators”. Giving moderators sole billing is awkward. Furthermore, the description focuses on a few technical roles, but a community is the sum of its members. Many an organization is effectively run by a few users who may not have any formal title — that guy who knows everybody, the person that people go to when they want to resolve an argument… Activities like promotion (at least in a volunteer organization) and more generally engaging (fellow) participants, content curation or debating policies are not limited to a particular role. This site isn't about a particular role, it's about the principles of doing stuff together.

This site is not Stack Exchange Moderators. We've had many Stack Exchange moderators drift towards this site thinking it would be, even during the beta. Users complaining about Stack Exchange moderators or moderation have started to find our chatroom. But the site about Stack Exchange moderatorstion is Meta Stack Exchange. This site is a Stack Exchange site about… moderation, among other topics.

On the same vein, the URL https://communitybuilding.stackexchange.com/ used to point to an information site for Stack Exchange moderators. This is another obvious source of confusion. Let's leave https://communitybuilding.stackexchange.com/ for Stack Exchange moderators and use a different, less confusing URL for this site.

All in all, Moderators is a bad name.

---

I like AviD's proposal: Community Building. Community building encompasses all aspects of making a community work; moderation (if any) is clearly just one of the many aspects. It's all about getting people to act together; moderators are the oil in the cogs, but we emphasize the cogs.

I'm not so fond of Community Management or Community Managers. Management suggests that this site is only about the top of the hierarchy. Managers is as bad as Moderators in restricting to a particular role.

Alternatively, I could see Communities. On the plus side, it's short. On the other hand, it is a bit vague.

Answer 2

I would suggest just "Community Building" to put more emphasis on the community building aspect. We really mostly want to be concerned about building communities and part of building communities is having effective moderation. The one is dependent on the other. Since compound names can be long and confusing, "Community Building" is enough I think.

Answer 3

Of all the suggestions made I like communities. I think it encompasses everything we cover here, whereas all the other suggestions are too narrow and only focus on a part of what we offer.

Some people have pointed out that it might be too vague but I think anything else is too specific. We want vague to cover everything we do. We cover a wide range of things here. We are a Q&A site for anything and everything community.

Answer 4

I think it's worth considering Moderated Communities as an alternative to the current site name.

Pros:

• Less of an exclusive focus on moderators
• Identifies the community as defining the scope of the site, rather than any one role or activity (e.g., moderation, administration, management)
• Does not explicitly rule out "offline" communities from being discussed
• Does not create a pressure to expand our scope to "offline" communities, if we decide we'd rather not go that route
• Makes it more clear that this site is not intended simply for moderators of this (SE) community

Cons:

• Is this different enough from the current name to justify a change?
• What about communities that aren't moderated? We do have at least one question that skirts this issue; would this name exclude any communities that we'd otherwise want to include?

In my mind, the idea of a moderated community encompasses far more than just communities that have formal moderators. Stack Exchange is a great example of crowdsourced moderation - we've already seen that this site is heavily populated with community moderators from SE, but I think even they would admit that SE is moderated primarily by the voting and reviewing of so-called "regular" users (including those with a lot of reputation).

I don't think we want to imply too much of a focus on a role that would seem to exclude some of our desired demographic. We definitely want users who are not moderators on SE, and I think we would also welcome questions from users who are not moderators anywhere -- or administrators, managers, builders, etc. -- but who simply have an interest, or are considering taking on such a role.