Draft Mattermost Moderation (working title)

What is Moderation, why do we need it and who does it? These questions arise with any open chat service. like Mattermost and we have to have guidelines on what is acceptable. Sometimes, posts can get heated and hurt people's feelings, so some sort of feedback and, possibly, corrective action, is necessary. That's what Moderation is all about - keeping the posts within agreed limits of acceptability for all our users.

So, who does it? Well, we're a Self Organising System so, like it says in the Comm's Systems Behaviour Guide: "We owe each other a duty of care to make our presence on our communications platforms a comfortable and beneficial experience." Maintaining good behaviour falls to all of us, and we need to be careful in the manner we start or respond to a post. There will be times when you find a post that fails to meet what you feel are acceptable standards. Now, you might reply to it directly yourself, and explain why you find it unacceptable possibly suggesting, to the poster, a potentially more acceptable way of making their point. Alternatively, you might bring it to the attention of the channels's Team Admin, whose username you can find in the Channel Member List. However, there will be a need for more formal oversight, particularly with channels including Town Square and Off Topic, where a greater number of members congregate and more diverse topics are discussed.