Dear citizens of jawns.club,

For the first time, we are opening applications from Jawns.club members who would like to help moderate our server. Anyone with an active jawns.club account at the time of this announcement is eligible to apply.

The primary day-to-day responsibility shared by the mod team includes reviewing and taking action on post reports. These reports are most often a mix of spam reports and code-of-conduct violations, usually limited to a couple of reports per week, although occasionally we see spikes of activity where having extra eyes would be helpful. 

We also proactively block or mute servers with poor moderation before the spam or harassment they host can directly affect our members, and manage the "trending" section on Jawns.club by approving hashtags, posts, and links before they can visibly "trend".

Beyond such basic moderation tasks, additional help may include:

For some idea of our approach to moderation, please review the Code of Conduct and our moderation guidelines.

At this time, we're only adding one new mod to the team, in part so we can polish our onboarding process. Over time, we would like to add more people to the team! 

As a part of this step forward, we specifically want to improve the diversity of our mod team.
 
While both Alex and I work hard to be good citizens and accomplices for those from marginalized communities and backgrounds, we're both straight white cis male US citizens who speak English exclusively.

The demographics of our server also lean that way, and we want to do a better job of welcoming the full diversity of the people living in the Philadelphia area; we want to add community leaders to the team who represent those groups. This includes people with disabilities, people who are neurodivergent, really anyone who our society tends to burden under the dominant paradigm of "normality".

While not a requirement, we are especially interested in mods who speak literally any language besides English, so we can moderate conversations in other languages. Popular languages in Philly include Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese / Mandarin, Haitian Creole, Vietnamese, French, and Russian. We would love to include such languages on Jawns.club and better serve the local community, but it is challenging to do so without mods who are fluent in those languages, who can help reach out to the communities in question.

If you'd like to be considered for the mod team, please fill out this application form:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd1aOsKc6rHtW6xgDYlC-aDM2u9Pu5unVSrI9Zwq0GpapcwFA/viewform

Applications are due by February 29th.

We will review applications in March and hopefully announce a new addition to the mod team soon after!

Thanks as always for your support and participation in our corner of the Fediverse :)

-Nelson and Alex