2013 Moderator Election

With support from others in the meta thread 2013 Moderator Nominations, I am formally nominating myself for the position of moderator.

I have been an active participant at MathOverflow for close to four years now, and a participant and observer of the meta sites for nearly as long. As a mathematician unattached to a university, I rely almost exclusively on internet sites (MathOverflow and the nLab, to name two) to stay abreast of developments in mathematics. Maintaining high quality of such sites is thus an enduring concern and commitment of mine.

Since the inception of MO, there has been a healthy dynamic tension between those who on one end prefer strictly mathematical questions pitched at very high professional levels, and those who are more permissive. My own positions (as expressed in comments and at meta) are at many points along this spectrum, but generally I hew toward the original vision of MO as being largely for mathematicians who need answers in areas where they are inexpert. While I am generally impressed by how the community monitors itself, I try to counteract tendencies toward snap judgments I see in myself and others.

I will also put myself up for the moderator election.

I've been a long-time contributor to MO and really enjoy the atmosphere where people are free to talk about any research mathematics. It has been very useful for me.

I've been a fairly regular contributor to various community moderator aspects of the forum like closing/reopening, deleting and undeleting questions as well as many policy discussions, primarily on the old meta forum.

I hereby nominate myself.

I have been a MO user for over three years now and have been pretty active both on the main site and (less) on the old meta. In this time I have learned an enormous amount of math from MO and its users —most of which I would not have had probably even come across without MO— and have managed to help a few people myself along the way.

I very much think MO is an extremely valuable resource, and I somewhat marvel both at how well is has worked in the past and at how well this success has continued into the present: almost four years of existence, in Internet terms, is an eon. This is in no small part due to the way problems —which have of course arisen— have been managed, and that we owe to both the excellent people which have been doing the moderation and the remarkable set of users the site has.

For some two years now, I have been moderator at math.stackexchange.com, so I am quite familiar with how the moderation tools work at SE: that always helps.

I will stand as a candidate. While I have become less active in posting questions and answers to MO, I still check the site daily. Moderating seems to me like a good way to remain involved and contribute.

I believe that my background (mathematician in industry/government; research typically focused on physics/CS) can be a good complement to the remaining moderator team, insofar as that would ever matter.

An ideal moderator would be noticed iff circumstances demand it. I would attach the greatest importance to careful deliberation and reaching consensus, both internally amongst the moderator team and the community at large.

Yet there is inevitably some latitude in the actions a moderator might take. I would, for instance, tend to err on the side of encouraging:

• questions at or above the level of a strong second-year graduate student;
• a progressively broader and more representative cross-section of mathematical activity, especially questions of applied mathematics and substantive mathematical questions from other fields;
• professional questions about the discipline of mathematics that are not obviously better asked elsewhere (e.g., academia.SE).

I would like to nominate myself.

I have been on MO for more than three years, so I think I understand how the site is evolving, what has worked, and what may use some improvement. One thing I've always admired about the current moderators is their fairness. I hope we can continue this thread, and I would like to do my part for this as well. This may require that I curve down being as opinionated as I feel sometimes, but that is a given.

In general, I think MO is a great resource for the mathematical community, and I would like to contribute to it beyond my (meager) mathematical contributions.

I have been reading MathOverflow and meta.mathoverflow.net since 2010. I chose to adopt this username for the 2.0 migration to see how the new version works and to see how a new user would be treated. (Not as well as I had hoped, but perhaps my expectations were too high.) I am familiar with many of the policies of MO, with some of the debates, and with some of the concerns.

I inhabit the same time zone as the departing moderator, and I have seen some of his work as moderator, enough that I have a good example to follow. Although I prefer this persona presently as contributor and possible moderator, I am prepared to reveal enough of myself to the other moderators to establish a good working relationship.

My virtual hat is in the ring.

Let me "step forward" and volunteer to candidate for the role of a moderator in the service of the MathOverflow community. This is certainly not to claim that I am the best one to take this role, and I also suggest you to take my candidacy as an encouragement to candidate yourself.

First of all, I would like to emphasize that the present moderators have done a great job so far! --

In fact, I cannot remember to have seen a single instance where I would have disagreed with what a moderator did or did not do. I would feel honored to get the opportunity to help that also in the future as many as possible members of the MO community make a similar experience.

From a practical perspective, while 4 of the 6 present moderators are based in the US, one in Japan and one in Australia, I live in Germany and would thus improve the coverage of time zones in Europe.

Finally, getting back to what I said above, in due course I will nominate at 2013 Moderator Nominations someone else whom I think would be an excellent moderator.