NOTE: The questionnaire is now up
Related to Will there be a candidate questionnaire for the upcoming election? and 2020 Community Moderator Election
Please post answers below that contain a question you would like to have moderator candidates answer. Since this is abbreviated, we'll take the top 8 answers for a separate question for candidates to post to.
A classic: In your opinion, what is the biggest problem/challenge Politics Stack Exchange is currently facing? How would you propose to solve it?
There's always a user or two who wants to debate where questions cross the community defined good-faith standard (which now has its own close reason)
Do you think the standard is sufficient as-is or is there anything you would like to see added or removed?
A question quickly passes into the Hot Network Questions territory, but begins to gather answers that tend to contain rants about the politicians involved, rather than pure answers (i.e. the rantier answers get lots of upvotes). Would you close it, remove it from the HNQ list (mod power) or leave it alone?
Most people have biases. It's human nature.
To be a good moderator, it's important that you act fairly. That can be hard sometimes if you're biased towards one side or another in a particular conversation. How do you keep your biases in check when performing moderation tasks?
A candidate mentioned "long arguments in comments" as one of the (many) things they would like to be a moderator to act on. My question for all the candidates is:
While these long arguments in comments are generally frowned upon on SE, some of them may be useful in weeding out fine detail. Do you differentiate between long comment discussions that may be potentially useful to someone and those that just go past some number of comments between two or more members?
And what do you consider the best approach to dealing with long arguments/debates in comments? Should they be deleted or sent to chat or have you other ideas?
I am not a lawyer, but would like to see a question to catch whether a candidate works for or on behalf of a political party, PAC, politician, or is some kind of hireling (or necessary sponsor) of one. But it seems doubtful whether everyone so affiliated would be forthcoming about that, particularly if they've signed an NDA (non-disclosure agreement). Therefore we might ask candidates a meta-question like:
"Are you now, and will you be, free from, and not under any obligations public or private, open or confidential, legal, occupational, or contractual, that motivate you to become a moderator, or which would otherwise alter your behavior as a moderator, and enjoin you from ever directly mentioning your participation in them?"
A "no" answer would be bad, and a sincere "yes" answer would be good. The idea being that while NDA's might forbid telling others about the NDA, they cannot prevent people who haven't signed one from telling us they haven't, nor prevent those who did sign one from saying that they haven't not signed one.
Many of our users are affiliated with political parties. Their affiliations can be splashed into the public, deliberately or accidentally. This produces a suspicion that these users' actions as Moderators are biased, whether it is true or not.
Say, you see another Moderator removed a post and you receive a flag claiming that the deletion has been caused by the Moderator's affiliation, not the post itself. Practically, what gauges would you consider for your response?
Why do you want to be a moderator on this site? Seeing that there are so many more fun and / or lucrative pursuits out there, why commit to moderating this site?
While this may seem like an odd question, I think it's good to know what motivates our leaders.
For whatever reason politics seems to invoke strong reactions in people. Often times, this can lead to rising tensions, both in in-person conversations and on this site. Unfortunately, that means that it's not terribly uncommon for a question to spark controversy and raise tensions very quickly. What steps do you take to help deescalate a situation that has gotten out of hand?
One from the Buffett playbook (slightly rephrased to fit this election):
What policy, with respect to running and moderating the site, are you in favor of, that (you think) most of our users are against?
The Stack Exchange network is designed to be mostly self-regulating, making most of the moderation tools already available to normal users.
As a normal user, are you satisfied with your prior accomplishments of voting, editing, flagging, and Review Queues on main site and on Meta? How would the Moderator status (read: your access to even more powerful moderation tools) help increase your patrolling productivity?
