admin FAQ
how does one become a microformats admin
Q: How does one become a microformats admin?
A: As with many small grass roots communities, the responsibility of curating, moderating, and helping manage the microformats community has evolved over time. Here is how microformats admins have come into that role historically:
The founders of microformats.org, that is, the people that did the work to create microformats that went into microformats.org, as well as setup the domain, the site, the wiki, the blog, the mailing lists formed the initial set of admins.
From there it was clear that it would be helpful to add admins help out with admin-to-do items and other general administrative duties for microformats.org.
The existing admins nominated individuals from the community who:
- had expressed interest in helping out with administrative duties
- were already productive contributors - in terms of examples, implementations, and/or specifications
- and most importantly: had a consistently positive impact in the community - on the mailing list(s) and the wiki.
Several individuals were nominated, and approved by consensus of existing admins and thus the list of admins grew.
Along the way it became clear that wiki spam in particular was a pain, and that adding individuals who were committed to even just reverting wiki spam and blocking spammers would be a good thing, and thus a few wiki-only admins were added.
Thus as of 2011, if you're interested in becoming a microformats admin, here are a few things you can do which have worked well in the past:
- Be a positive contributor to the community. Help politely answer questions from newcomers. Help fix problems on the wiki.
- See if any of the ongoing admin duties are something you can and want to help out with.
- After establishing yourself as a positive contributor to the microformats community, contact an admin and ask if you can help with one or more specific ongoing admin duties (especially if you notice any that are being neglected!).
I believe the above three steps are accessible to anyone who has a positive attitude and is eager to learn. Some duties require more technical capabilities than others, however even if all you want to do is help with promptly/responsively cleaning/blocking wiki spam, even that can be helpful.
Tantek 00:08, 2 April 2011 (UTC), founder and admin, microformats.org