The journey has been long and at times arduous, encountering many heated debates and quite a few giggles along the way. What am I talking about? I’m talking about my somewhat unwitting journey into the world of facebook group administration.
It was a dreich and dreary January day back in 2014 when I started my group. I had been debating and researching online in response to what was, probably the biggest political event of my lifetime, the Scottish Independence referendum.
For several months prior, I had been trying to research and discuss findings within the multitude of political debate groups that had popped up for the same purpose, however what I found was, pages that were for Scottish Independence had zero tolerance for those of a unionist/yes averse persuasion and the unionist pages had a zero tolerance for seemingly everyone but those directly aligned with their members personal & political views.
It was getting to such a ridiculous stage that one morning I thought… How hard can it be and hit the big green “Create Group” button and that was the genesis point.
The group was originally called “A Sensible Debate about the Scottish Referendum”, because that’s what I wanted to have, so I figured it was a good fit at the time (if somewhat of a mouthful)
I set about crafting a very simple set of rules and added them to the group description along with the primary rule as a cover photo in the group banner.
The main two rules within the page are simple
Other rules were also added that helped with overall structure and content expectations and setting out more detailed behavioural expectations but ultimately the two main rules are the main drivers in group management and admin decisions.
The whole goal was to create a platform for debate that was moderated by these simple rules and not political persuasion, a place where people could voice their opinions, debate their evidenced points of view or simply ask questions about things on which they were unclear.
I ran the page by myself for about the first 2 or 3 months (from memory) before promoting some of the long standing regular contributors to admin positions, which was massively helpful as the time being consumed running and managing the page was getting outrageous by that point.
*Big shout out to all the Sensible Admins btw (past and present) I owe you guys a debt.
But, I digress, the page started to gain popularity and we quickly grew over the months leading up to the referendum in September 2014, which was a busy month indeed. I think by that point, we’d reached about 15,000 members and were getting a LOT of debates and comments within those debates to try and manage.
After the Indy Ref, the group trundled along – mostly complaining about how Scotland lost and what MI5 had to do with it, which was getting rather tedious, so I decided to rebrand into just “Sensible Debate” and open the topics up to pretty much any question you’d like to ask on anything. The only caveat was I added a rule that if the question wasn’t a political one that the post question be prepended with “NPP”.
This didn’t go down too well with some of the members, initially, but we kissed and made up in the end…
4 years on, we now debate, Politics, Science, Technology, Economics, News & Current affairs, Sports, Music and everything in between and so, the journey continues, we’ve had lot’s of fun at Trump’s expense, there’s always the Tories or Labour parties up to some trick other and the general debate volumes are still good.
Big shout out to all the members too, we wouldn't have a page without those guys...
I spend a lot of time while I’m doing other things, checking the group chatter on the phone while out shopping or while I’m waiting on a coffee in Starbucks or whatever, it becomes almost second nature to be connected to the matrix like Neo.
Why not check the group out, if you like (mostly) fair and reasoned debate with a healthy dose of friendly banter and maybe some comedy for good measure.
I’ve made many a friend through the page and its subsequent nights out, and am often told it’s one of the best groups on facebook of its type, so I’m quite proud of that…
http://www.facebook.com/groups/myindyforum
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