Community Moderator

What the opportunity is

This is a voluntary community moderation role for our Facebook community, working as part of an established moderation team.

Day to day it means reviewing posts, comments and membership requests, applying our rules fairly and consistently, and helping keep the group a place people actually want to be in.

Why it matters

A local group this size is where a lot of the area's conversation actually happens — what people are worried about, what they need, what they are proud of, and what they want changing.

Stewarding that well is a real responsibility. Done badly it becomes somewhere people avoid. Done well it is genuinely useful to thousands of neighbours.

What you could get out of it

You see firsthand the topics, concerns and ideas that matter to local people — and you build experience that is hard to get any other way.

• Community management at real scale
• Judgement — the skill of deciding well with incomplete information
• Moderation practice and how rules work in the real world
• Communication, including when somebody is upset with you
• Handling difficult situations calmly
• Applying a rule fairly even when you would have decided differently
• A much clearer understanding of local issues
• Working as part of an established team rather than alone

What we are looking for

• A genuine local connection — you live in, or are properly connected to, Stevenage or the surrounding areas
• Reasonably active on Facebook
• Happy to talk to our team through WhatsApp
• Fair and level-headed
• Comfortable reviewing posts, comments and membership requests
• Able to separate your own opinions from a moderation decision
• Politically neutral while acting as a moderator
• Willing to learn our existing rules and values
• Reliable
• Community-minded

What is involved

A lot of moderation is small and routine: checking whether somebody asking to join is a real local person rather than a spam or fake account, and whether a post belongs in the group.

For the first while, the bigger decisions — removing somebody, suspending or banning an account, taking down a contested post — are discussed in the moderator chat rather than made on your own. That is not a lack of trust; it is how we stay consistent, and it means you are never left carrying a difficult call by yourself. Once you are comfortable with how we operate, that changes.

On membership requests, the question is always whether somebody has a genuine reason to be part of this local community. It is never about where someone is from.