SYC Life along with its predecessor Stewartstown.com have been around for over eight years now.  It’s a remarkably active site for the size of the community it serves, which is strong evidence of an involved and interested population.  I want it to continue long into the future, at least until its usefulness is gone.  To do that I will need some help, first because I can’t keep up with moderating the sometimes very active forums, but also to eventually make the site less dependent on me for its continuation.  I don’t know much, or anything really, about how to go about the latter, so let’s start with forum moderation.

I would like to add two moderators to the site.  These will need to be people who are already active members and respected by the SYC Life community and by me.  They will have authority to enforce the SYC Life terms of service throughout the forums.  This will also form a moderating team of three (counting myself) who can collaborate on how to handle more borderline cases of possible TOS violation.  I have some ideas of who would be good fits for the job, but I’d like to get your input.  To avoid a public discussion of site members, please send me a private message with your suggestion(s) for this role.  I’ll use your input to help me move forward on this.

It may not be wise for me to open up this latter area to open discussion, but let’s do it anyway.  My thought is to gently ease towards the goal of having SYC Life under the oversight of a small group of active community members, something like a board of directors, though that sounds a bit formal and high-brow to my ears.  At the end of the road this group would be responsible for all decisions related to the site.  Let me admit that this makes me nervous; after all I’ve had a free hand so far!  That’s where the “gently ease” bit comes in.  Maybe a good starting point would be to create an advisory committee or something like that.  What do you think?  Do you have other ideas?  Let’s discuss it!