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The "community bulletin" section of a site usually contains featured meta posts. It can also contain community events, which are essentially calendar entries. These aren't widely used, but one of my sites uses them on a weekly (or more-than-weekly) basis.

Currently these events can be created and edited only by moderators. Editing recurring events is quite tedious, and it would sure be nice if the community could help. I propose extending this to high-rep users -- I'm thinking 15k, to add something to the privilege level that currently grants only question protection, but I'm open to other options.

Currently what happens is stuff like this:

@msh210 @MonicaCellio Can we please get some featured tags? Right now, parashat-nitzavim and perhaps rosh-hashanah-new-year too. (source)

devorim should be featured. Probably nine-days or tisha-bav as well. (source)

@mods What happened to the weekly parsha events? They've been AWOL for a few weeks already. (source)

(There's more, but you get the idea.)

Can we please not make community events wholly the responsibility of moderators? Can we come up with a way for community members to help? I had initially proposed letting community members edit these directly, because the community can audit, the scope of damage is limited, and no PII is involved, but Isaac makes a good point: mod approval would still be a good idea. But can we come up with a way for interested community members to do the heavy lifting?

I don't see a down-side and, for sites that use events, I see plenty of up-side.

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    I don't think this should be a general privilege, but for sites that use it it might make sense to give mods the ability to delegate this power. My worry would be that most users don't know what to make of that feature and how to use it, especially on sites that don't make regular use of it and there is no established precedent. – Mad Scientist Sep 8 '15 at 17:36
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    @MadScientist making its availability site-dependent would be fine. I almost instead proposed "allow mods to delegate to specific users", but I thought making it privilege-based would fit better into existing tooling. – Monica Cellio Sep 8 '15 at 17:37
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It seems to me that fixed, admin-generated parts of the front page (as opposed to Q&A titles, which are clearly user-generated) should meet a high bar for stability and appropriateness. So, for example, they should be very unlikely to ever be the subject of an edit war or of a rogue user making them say something inappropriate. (By "inappropriate," I don't just mean NSFW; I mean "inappropriate for this context." For example, "Happy birthday, Mom!" would be inappropriate to put on an SE site's community event.)

The other fixed, admin-generated part of the site that I'm aware of that SE gives users the ability to edit is part of the FAQ, and that is only editable by mods. This seems to me to be a good policy, since elected/appointed mods are a finite, well-defined group that are accountable by agreement for their actions. If a mod abuses powers, SE could unseat that mod, removing the powers that were abused without impacting the mod's ability to participate as a user. If a high-rep user abuses powers, there isn't currently a mechanism (that I know of) for stripping that user of the relevant powers other than account suspension, which hampers the user's general participation on the site.

Therefore, I recommend that the community events only change as a direct result of mod action.

However, to allow for other community members' helping maintain the community events list, users who attain a certain rep level should be allowed to propose edits to the list that would then show up on a queue that mods could clear with one "approve/deny" click per proposal, similar to the various other "suggested edit" queues.

| improve this answer | |
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    Interesting idea -- proposed edits for one-click disposition by moderators would solve the problem. – Monica Cellio Sep 8 '15 at 18:25

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