Opensource.com welcomes new moderators and updates program

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Opensource.com

Last year, we announced the Opensource.com Community Moderator program. It's been a huge success. We've learned a lot from our moderators and have recently made updates as we continually improve the program.

The purpose of the Community Moderator program is to identify key Opensource.com contributors and advocates and to provide them with guidelines and a framework for how they can best participate, including advising our team on future decisions regarding the site and community.

We launched the program in February 2013 with four moderators: Nicole Engard, Carolyn Fox, Luis Ibanez, and Phil Shapiro. Then, in September we invited all of the moderators to Raleigh, NC for a collaborative strategy session. This year we're hoping to invite them back, in addition to our newest moderators, to Raleigh in October in conjunction with the All Things Open conference.

Our community moderators have become critical to the success of the Opensource.com community. If you haven't yet read article by them, check out some of their contributions.

Welcome new moderators

We continue to identify top contributors in our community and have doubled the number of moderators in our program over the last few months. It's my pleasure to officially welcome four new moderators:

  • RobinRobin Muilwijk joined the team in August of 2013 and has been an open source entrepreneur for more than ten years. He's helping us stay updated on open source activities in Europe and is often found commenting on the site and sharing on social media.

 

  • AseemAseem Sharma joined our team in November 2013 and has recently graduated from Conrad Business, Entrepreneurship and Technology Centre, Faculty of Engineering at University of Waterloo, Canada.

 

  • MarcusMarcus D. Hanwell joined our team in December 2013 and is a Technical Leader in the Scientific Computing group at Kitware, Inc. He leads the Open Chemistry project, developing open source tools for chemistry, bioinformatics, and materials science research.

 

  • RemyDRemy Decausemaker joined our team in December 2013 and is an Assistant Director of the Rochester Institute of Technology Lab for Technological Literacy and serves as Campaign Architect of FOSS@MAGIC. Inside and outside of the classroom, he helps mentor and guide the students of RIT's Humanitarian Free/Opensource Software Development course.

Program updates

We also gathered feedback about the first iteration of the program and made a few revisions to how it works. First, we created different specializations as we wanted to provide contributors with than efficient way to bring their various skills to the table. Moderators can now choose from content creation, content curation, and community nurturing. We will continue to identify new roles as the program evolves.

Our communitiy moderators are also enjoying a few new perks including an Opensource.com email alias, priority editing from the Opensource.com editing team, an invitation to attend the All Things Open conference, and a LinkedIn recommendation upon fulfillment of their commitment.

 


If you are interested in becoming a monthly contributor or would like to be considered for the role of Community Moderator, contact the Opensource.com team.

 

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Jason Hibbets is a Community Director at Red Hat with the Digital Communities team. He works with the Enable Architect, Enable Sysadmin, Enterprisers Project, and Opensource.com community publications.

5 Comments

Let me echo what Jason Hibbets said and add my personal note of thanks to the moderator team for everything they do. Opensource.com is a better place because of each of you!

Opensource.com and Red Hat Inc. are the pioneers in the software world and in spearheading the open source culture globally. The opportunity to attend the AllThingsOpen conference and network with the open source think tank is amazing. Personally, the community moderator program has added a lot to my growth and it is very satisfying to work with the team at Opensource.com.

It is great to be a part of the team, and I appreciate all of the work the Opensource.com team does behind the scenes to make this such a strong and vibrant community. I will be doing what I can to bring the intersection of open science, open data, and open source to this community. Looking forward to a great 2014!

I have enjoyed Opensource.com immensely and find the media covers many areas of Open Source, particularly in Education and government more completely and insightfully than any other.

My one recommendation for "new" and seasoned moderators on Opensource.com - is that they regularly remind commenters to not stray from article focus and content and to stay on topic.

While this task maybe unnecessary for this website, as I have not seen - to date - any real deviation from subject matter in comments, the problem of crass off-topic comments and rants have become common place and distasteful on several of the more popular technology forums and blogs.

Moreso, it is advised for moderators to be ever diligent in noticing any commentary that is slyly skewed to promote Microsoft particularly, and other proprietary software products and services as "supposedly" Open Source solutions or models, or claim superiority of these proprietary products over Open Source without offering any credible supporting data.

Thank you for your hard work team! Keep inspiring people and keep changing lives.

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