Room Moderation and policies

This document outlines roles and responsibilities of room owners and room moderators. If you are looking to create a new room in the Ubuntu Matrix homeserver, make sure you follow the official process.

Room owners

Room owners are responsible for all conduct within their room. In order to share load and responsibilities, it would be ideal to also have a few moderators (mods) in each room. The general preference of the Ubuntu Matrix Council is that there should not be a formal process to become a moderator. Instead, room owners can offer the moderator role to members of their community. This ensures alignment with the moderation style and vision of the Ubuntu homeserver. In order for this to work at scale, room owners are encouraged to read Moderation and Defense of our Matrix Community .

Room moderators

Once room owners identify a potential candidate to be a room moderator, they have the authority to grant them moderator (mod) power level. Before doing so, it is also recommended that potential new room moderators read the Ubuntu CoC and Moderation and Defense of our Matrix Community.
Room moderators should also join the Ubuntu Matrix Ops room #matrix-ops:ubuntu.com where they can ask for help or start discussions as needed.

Defender spotlight

Room owners are empowered to identify and spotlight outstanding moderators to become Defenders. This applies only to users that have an account on the Ubuntu Matrix homeserver. Room owners can reach out to room moderators that are in line with the moderation style and vision of the Ubuntu Matrix homeserver, ask them if they would be willing to be spotlighted to become a Defender. If the room moderator agrees, then Room owner can reach out to the ops team in this channel #matrix-ops:ubuntu.com and linkthe matrix handle of the moderator they would like to spotlight.
The ops team will start a process to mentor and train the upcoming server moderator, and once a positive outcome has been reached, the candidate is granted server moderator status.

Abandoned room policy

Once a room is abandoned by all mods and admins, the Matrix operators will take over. They may appoint new admins and mods, or close the room.

• Leaving a room as an admin is not alone enough to abandon a room - we don’t want people who briefly leave after getting upset to suddenly lose their room. A certain time period will of being absent from a room without prior planning would be considered abandonment (what that time period is has not yet been determined).
• The Council will not get involved if a user who is an admin or mod abandons a room but other admins and mods are still in the room. The abandoning user will retain their power as admin or mod if they come back. Room admins and mods can come to the Council to ask for the Council’s intervention if they so desire.
• If all admins abandon a room but mods are left, the Council may need to appoint new admins while leaving the existing mods in place (or promoting one or more of them to admin). This should be handled on a case-by-case basis since some rooms may have different concerns in this area than others. As a general rule, unless there was a misconduct report for the admin(s) who left, we will not strip admin permissions from them. We did not yet decide on a process for if new admins do need to be elected.

Governance

All rooms on our homeserver fall under the Ubuntu Matrix Governance. The Matrix Council has the final say in the policies of our homeserver.

Learn more

If you want to learn more, there are a few documents you can read to understand the basic concepts of Rooms and Spaces, Room Properties, and Room Publishing.