Summary: Craft CMS Stack Exchange will begin the nomination stage for an election on February 28, as your “graduation” election — and as had been discussed in this other post.
The timeline:
On February 21, I'll post a question collection post on Meta, so that the community can post questions they'd like to see the candidates answer.
Starting on February 28, users can nominate themselves. The top questions collected on the previous week will be compiled into a questionnaire on the election page, so that potential moderators can answer them.
The existing moderator team will need to run in the election if they wish to keep their positions.
On March 7, if there are 4 or more candidates, the election will move into the voting phase. If not, we'll extend the nomination period for a week. If, at the end of that extension period, there are still fewer than 4 candidates, we'll simply appoint the candidates who've nominated (and aren't already pro-tem mods), and we'll default to considering this a "pro-tem election" just to try to bring the total number of moderators on the site up to 3, if any of the current moderators wishes to step down (for full details of the process, see the announcement on Meta Stack Exchange). (There's a small chance we'll need to remove a nomination.)
If the election moves into the voting phase, I'll announce the results on Meta on March 15 (or March 22, if we need to extend the nomination period).
If you have any questions about the process, please post them in an answer here.