Post History

It's been a while since I asked this question.  In the meantime we've launched several communities that *weren't* transplants from SE, so most of our communities didn't start with "imported moderators".  Here's what we're doing for all communities now:

When a community is new, the moderation load is light and staff members can handle any issues that come up.  If there is a staff member with more domain knowledge than the rest of us, we generally ask that person to take the lead (for example, Mithrandir24601 on Physics).  If there is someone who seems to us like an *obvious* leader from within the community, we might ask that person directly to serve temporarily. Sometime later, when the community has some activity and more of a user base, we post on the community's meta asking who the temporary moderators should be.  We feel strongly that communities should make their own decisions; that said, there needs to *be* a community to make decisions, hence treating these initial appointments as temporary.  A community that grows to thousands of people might want to revisit the decisions made by the dozen people who chose the initial mods -- or not.  Up to them.  (I acknowledge that this part of the lifecycle is fuzzy because no one's gotten there yet.)