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:
Robin 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.
Aseem 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.
Marcus 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.
Remy 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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