Administrator Guidelines
Administrators (Admins) are responsible for project management of the Open Directory Project. This includes all aspects of the project, with the exception of the following, which are the responsibility of AOL/Netscape staff members:
- Legal matters.
- Operational, hardware, and hosting issues.
- Changes to dmoz.org editing software.
- Public relations.
- Management of staff.
Abilities
Admins have access to the same set of tools and resources as those with Root privileges. This includes all tools and privileges available to (k)meta editors, as well as the ability to:
- Grant/revoke/remove/reinstate (k)cateditall+ permissions.
- Make changes to the public interface.
- Create and modify submission policies, editing guidelines, and other documentation on dmoz.org.
- Create and change the dashboard message.
- Oversee editorial activities and community governance/engagement.
- Upload modified language strings.
- Moderate the editor forums.
Individual Expectations
Each individual Administrator is expected to:
- Actively participate in the functioning of the Admin group. In addition, administrators should be visible in discussion forums and editing activities. If time constraints do not allow an active level of participation for an extended period of time, the individual is expected to resign from their Admin privileges.
- Act according to group consensus, often following discussion, and support group decisions.
- Act and communicate in a professional and objective manner at all times. Administrators should adhere to the highest standards.
Failure to satisfy these expectation will result in the removal of Admin privileges.
Administrator Group Expectations
As a group, Administrators are expected to:
- Take an active, visible role in managing the project.
- Communicate a shared philosophy and vision of the directory to internal and external parties.
- Work with editors of all levels to ensure that quality standards are being met in terms of editing, ontology, and community management.
- Evaluate and implement innovative proposals designed to improve the directory.
- Encourage self-regulation at all levels, but resolve escalating contentious issues when necessary.
Group Responsibilities
Each Admin has a primary area of responsibility. This helps promote specialisation, ensure that all key areas receive the necessary focus, and provide clear points of contact for the community. It does not, however, preclude any Administrator from participating in other activities. In fact, Administrators are encouraged to participate in all activities, as their interests, abilities, and time allow.
The focus areas are:
- Technical Administration
- Work with staff to address operations issues, and software bugs and features.
- Editor produced tools and cooperative initiatives.
- Management of research.dmoz.org and data repositories.
- Internationalization/Localization issues.
- Community Administration
- Cateditall+ promotions and editor application oversight.
- Reinstatements oversight.
- Abuse report oversight.
- Work with metas on editor-specific issues and community management concerns.
- Monitor forums for escalating issues, etc.
- Ensure that editors' communications are civil and polite.
- Editorial Administration
- Oversight of taxonomy and ontology.
- Oversight of directory quality.
- Monitor initiatives aimed to improve directory organization and data quality.
- Marketing / Product Management
- Public Relations.
- Documentation on dmoz.org.
They are managed like so:
- chris2001 - Editorial and Community Administration in World/.
- gti96 - Community Administration.
- marisa1116 - Community Administration.
- orlady - Editorial Administration.
- rpfuller - Technical Administration.
