Sorry about the slow response. I had an unusually busy weekend and start of the week.

I'm not reading the other answer until I write my first draft, to avoid an unfair advantage of answering last.

Also, I'd make a good mod, but there are at least a couple candidates that are better choices than me. I'm maybe the 3rd, 4th or 5th best candidate here, not the 1st or 2nd. If I'm elected without somebody else pulling out, something has gone horribly wrong.

Do you agree with MDMarra's linked assessment here, and do you think that anything can or should be done about it? If so, what?

I see both a problem with the "gruffness" that edges into rudeness too often, and with the site getting watered down. My own usage of the site isn't what it used to be because there's just so many questions that don't interest me flowing in that it's hard to find the interesting questions. Even questions that are in areas I might like to write up an answer in, are often fairly borderline poor questions.

I don't have any good ideas about how moderators can help with the watering down problem, though. It's a really difficult problem. I don't think that excluding beginning sysadmins is a good idea, though trying to encourage them to do a bit of homework before bringing their question over could help. Tweaking our site scope to more clearly exclude questions that are trivially answered by looking at the documentation might help... Mostly, I think answers to this problem need to come from the community discussing the issues, and achieving consensus, not from the action of a couple moderators.

How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?

There's a bit of ambiguity in this question whether you mean arguments over correctness, or things that cross into rudeness...

Disagreements about whether or not an answer is right are fine, as long as

Rude and insulting behavior from users can be like a slow poison. Sure, the user is contributing some valuable answers, but they're also slowly destroying the site by making things unpleasant for everybody.

Assuming rudeness, personal insults, etc, in addition to deleting all the rude comments, the general escalation path is:

1. Some gentle comments on their posts asking them to tone it down.
2. Some firmer comments on their posts warning them that rudeness won't be tolerated.
3. Privately contacting the user with a private moderator-on-user chat
4. Send them a message using the "Contact user privately" moderator tool. Probably use the "abusive to others" template as a starting point.
5. Short suspension
6. Longer suspension

There's only escalation if a given step doesn't seem to have worked. If a user does appear to be trying to correct the behavior but not quite getting it right, that step may be repeated instead of going to the next step. If things are particularly egregious, the escalation can go faster. There's a certain amount of judgement involved. For something bad enough it's certainly possible to jump straight into suspension. Users with many valuable contributions might get a slower escalation.

How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?

I think I'd start with contacting the other mod privately and asking. If I was unable to reach that mod, I would ask the other mods. In the unlikely circumstance that I'm unable to reach any other mods, I'd examine the question very carefully. For a borderline question, I'd leave it alone, I might just go ahead and re-open or undelete something that looked like it might have been a mistake by the other mod to close. Everybody makes mistakes, and most moderator actions are reversible.

How would you deal with each of the following cases: A new user who is posting many off-topic questions (good quality, just not on-topic) | A new user who is posting many poor-quality questions (poorly researched, "do my work for me", or generally not up to the minimum standard of professionalism) | A user (new or established) arguing about a moderation decision | A user (new or established) harassing other users

Most of these I would follow the same basic escalation path I outlined in the second question. Gentle guidance followed by progressively firmer guidance. First case: "Please read our faq carefully and make sure you're posting on the right site", with migrations to the correct site and a slow escalation. Second case: "Your posts are getting a poor response (downvotes, etc) here on SF, and I believe they'd do better (and get you better answers) if you did a bit more initial research and put just a bit more effort into writing really good questions". Fourth case: "Rude and harassing behavior will not be tolerated. [insert relevant faq link]", and escalation might be quick.

The third case (user disagreeing with moderation decision) would be guided towards using meta instead of comments on the question. If it was my moderator decision, I'd try to have another moderator deal with it to minimize the appearance of moderator power abuse. Users have every right to disagree with moderator decisions. Sometimes users that disagree with moderator decisions are even right.

What can we do to keep people like MDMarra engaged in the main site and not just chat? It seems like after a certain point, Q&A isn't enough for expert-level people. There needs to be design and architecture discussions to keep people at a high-level interested, but we all know that discussion is not allowed on main. Is chat part of the natural "evolution" here, or can something be done to the main site to bring people like me back to it?

I don't know. I have to think about it more. I like chat. This seems like something the whole community needs to be involved in with grassroots efforts, not just a couple moderators with top-down changes.

Is this really a significant problem? I see a handful of expert-level questions in chat, and a lot of idle banter and

Server Fault has long held itself to be "a site for professionals" - our FAQ specifically calls this out: "Server Fault is for Information Technology Professionals needing expert answers related to managing computer systems in a professional capacity." How do you define "in a professional capacity" in the context of this site? What minimum standards of effort/professionalism do you intend to encourage as a moderator?

At a minimum "professional capacity" means to me "your primary job is taking care of these systems". I get the impression that a lot of higher rep users would like to see only experienced sysadmins asking questions on the site, but I think we need to be very cautious with any slippery slope like that. I'd love to be able to close questions as "you obviously didn't even try to read the docs", though.

In the nominations, every candidate has focused on what would make him a good moderator, but one thing I'd really like to know is: Where do you want ServerFault to go and how do you plan to help make it go there?

If I'm a moderator, I'll handle flags based on my best understanding of the community consensus and how SE sites work.

Moderators have the ability to close questions without the concurring votes of other community members. In light of this, how (if at all) will you change the way you evaluate questions that might need to be closed?

If something is borderline, I wouldn't close it unless there are already several close votes on it and/or a decent number of flags.

Yes, that means that some things that I've previously voted to close before, I wouldn't vote to close if I were moderator (unless there were sufficient agreeing votes or flags).

For something that it's obvious community consensus would be to close, I would go ahead and close it.

One thing I really like about this site is that a lot of the moderators tend to hang out in the Comms Room. This sort of "live support" is a lot more receptive in today's "instant" world versus email. While doing so is not explicitly required and nobody can expect a moderator to be available 24x7... Do you (as a potential moderator) think that this is a valuable way for a moderator to participate on the site, and why?

I'm often in chat. I do think there's a lot of value to having one or two moderators available in the Comms Room, but you don't really need to have all the mods in there. Chat is also a useful tool for some moderation things.

What is not well known is that Moderators also have final authority in the /review queues. Once a moderator has picked something, it's out of the queue one way or the other. The vasty closed-queue was emptied in large part because our existing mod-staff stepped in and helped muck out the stables; otherwise it would have taken a lot longer. Now that the glut is passed, what is your policy for delving into the /review queues as a moderator?

If the flag queue were empty, I'd delve into the /review queue now and then, and treat items in there pretty much like they're flagged items.