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I intend to support most RfBs from established administrators in good standing who:
- are engaged with the community;
- have a demonstrated track record in assessing consensus; and
- commit to following consensus decisions even when they personally disagree with them.
I think any administrator who meets these criteria would be a "net positive" addition to the crat corps. Making someone a bureaucrat is a fairly low stakes question compared with e.g. making someone a sysop:
- In practice, becoming an administrator confers a great deal of influence and discretion (mediating disputes, closing discussions, blocking people, hearing appeals), in addition to a lot of social capital, all at once. The damage that a single sysop can do is immense, ranging from driving folks off the project through intimidation or subtle harassment (accidentally or on purpose) to using their technical access maliciously (BEANS type stuff). This is why as a community we scrutinize RfAs fairly closely.
- Becoming a crat does not confer much additional "influence" over being a sysop. It's pretty hard to abuse the crat tools, and if a crat did abuse their crat tools, it'd be a lot easier to spot than abusing the sysop tools. The only real power that crats have is to participate in crat chats, which are analogous to being on a closing panel for an RfC, and I think I would trust basically every established admin who meets the criteria above to do so.
But we do still need new crats, because there are about 20 bureaucrats right now, only five of whom were elected in the last eight years. The pool of people who judge community consensus should include more new blood than that. I'm not personally convinced that crat chats are a good reason to keep an entire usergroup and election process around, but as long as we do have crat chats, we should have new crats.
Because I think we need new crats, and making new crats is a fairly low-risk activity, I intend to broadly support new RfBs.