Board Thread:Consensus Track/@comment-4984687-20150326211251/@comment-1251315-20150402155733

Atvelonis wrote: I'm not sure about this whole thing. I like the idea of the community having a stronger voice in who gets to become staff, but I'm worried that if we do this it will completely turn into a popularity contest.

What I'm afraid of is that someone ill-suited for a staff position with numerous friends will apply, and their friends will still back them; not because they deserve the position, but because they are friends. If we go ahead with this, I think the current staff should have the final say in an application to make sure this scenario doesn't occur. There are two things we can do: The only way that the stigma of "popularity contest" will go away is if voting is not the determinant factor (aka support/oppose templates). Simple.
 * 1) Do away with voting. That will remove the WHOLE aspect of "popularity contest". Reasoned discussion with a straw poll goes a long way to determine a consensus.
 * 2) The final decision being left only to crats. As a crat is the only person who would be able to grant most of the rights (rollback, patroller, sysop), it should be their final decision (but it should be a collective between Tim and CCC, possibly Flightmare as he is a crat without the crat flag lol). In the case of chat mod and forum mod, it can be the final decision of a plain sysop such as Atvelonis.