As most of you know, KivaFriends has a team of volunteer moderators who approve new KF membership applications and help keep the forum discussions on track and within the
KF Terms of Use & Registration Agreement and the KF
Guiding Principles. The members of the current moderating team feel it is time to add to our ranks. We would like to announce that two thoughtful and experienced KivaFriends have kindly agreed to join us, bringing our total to six and spreading our coverage across a wider range of timezones. Please welcome our two new moderators:
Ramona (
Mona) and
Natasha (
Natasha)
I am sure you will all join
Kerry,
Peter,
Wolfgang and
me in welcoming these two new members to the team. Thank you both for agreeing to help out, we really appreciate the extra energies, thoughts, and creativity, and the KivaFriends community is lucky to have you both.
Some of you may be curious about the actual tasks which the moderating team performs. The primary role of the team is to evaluate and approve or reject new member requests. There has been a recent increase in such requests, partly due to the increasing visibility of Kiva and the larger lender base, but our forum is also the target of
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) activity which we try to keep out of KivaFriends along with potential spammers or scammers. With multiple new registrations per day and some of them taking a fair amount of time to research, more help is very welcome.
The other main role that the moderators play is to ensure that KivaFriends members adhere to the
Terms Of Use and the KF
Guiding Principles. In order to do this we rely heavily on your participation. By clicking on the "Report to Moderator" link when you see something that you feel violates the TOU or the Guiding Principles, you help us to keep KivaFriends a place for civil discourse and interesting discussions. Only rarely do such issues arise; when they do, the moderators discuss member concerns on a private moderators-only section of the KivaFriends website, after which we act as needed, exercising our collective judgement on behalf of the KivaFriends community as a whole.
One last and minor activity of the moderators is to try to keep the site tidy by occasionally moving posts and threads which are misplaced.
We hope and trust you will welcome Mona and Natasha to the moderating team, and will give them your support as they learn their way around the tools, techniques, and traditions of moderating at KivaFriends. Thanks again for agreeing to join us, Mona and Natasha!
--Diane.
