Local politics to become a public category [done, with posting restricted to established members]

Pondering our opt-in politics categories:

Politics topics were originally squirrelled away into an opt-in category because they became divisive, non-local and niche-interest - but still generated a lot of posts and could easily overwhelm other forum activity.

Splitting into two politics categories was a step in the right direction - @general_politics remains a category best avoided by most forum members, but #local-politics is comparatively well behaved, more relevant to SE23 residents and less overwhelming in terms of number of posts.

Maybe it’s time to make #local-politics a public (as opposed to opt-in) category.

What do you think?

I’m for making all categories public. How will you handle the issue of funding local government?

Overall funding of U.K. councils is a @general_politics topic, right? And how Lewisham spends money is a #local-politics issue.

Let’s start by making topics in the #local-politics category visible to everyone.

Discussions about the 2018 councillor candidates, or the Forest Hill School saga, for example, ought to be publicly accessible.

We have to be careful though. To keep out sock-puppets accounts and non-local activists, we’ll restrict the creation of new #local-politics topics and replies to members with trust-level-2 or higher (about 550 of our members fall into this bracket).

We’ll also need to keep a close eye on #local-politics topics to ensure they don’t descend too far into @general_politics debate.

Let’s try (myself included) to keep local politics to issues directly relating to SE23 and its neighbouring postcode zones. The Lewisham mayor and council, local school issues, local planning policy etc.

Please be mindful that @moderators will readily move posts into @general_politics if necessary, in order to keep #local-politics a friendly, inclusive and open area of the forum.

We may need one or two ground-rules now #local-politics is a public category.

Firstly - endorsements. It’s natural to want to give your preferred candidate a boost, but we ask that people avoid making personal endorsements of political candidates on the forum, please.

Last year during the general election, endorsements got massively out of hand on SE23.life and we had to rein in one or two members who’d posted a slew of messages bigging up their favourite candidates.

It’s good to inform our membership about the candidates, but it’s inappropriate to solicit votes here, as this is not a campaign platform for any one side.

Uncritical campaigning can start to look like spam, and will be treated as such.

I think we learned a lot about how to handle this subject from the general election threads last year and if the mods start as they mean to go on, the local politics section will be a real asset to the forum and indeed the community.