Fireside Chat Project

Our democracy is in crisis because it is responsive only to the wealthy.

One weird trick can fix this: Politicians and constituents talking to each other online. So simple!

Welcome to the Fireside Chat Project, which organizes updates of FDR's Fireside Chats to provide the online politician¹-voter² conversations that our democracy needs to work as intended³.

Because they are conducted online, Fireside Chats can serve as a safe substitute for those real-live campaign activities which have been cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic. The procedure is:

Constituents ask single-topic questions on social media
Constituents rank unanswered questions via Likes, comments, etc
Politicians reply privately one-on-one to questioners via video
Questioners ask follow-ups and politicians reply until the conversation is complete
Completed Fireside Chats are publicly released on social media and campaign websites
Fireside Chats are also archived and indexed at Wikisource.

‘Fireside Chat’ forums - each focused on a single office - combine the best elements from town halls⁴ and from canvassing⁵. They:

offer voters direct contact⁶,
are moderated⁷,
encourage dialogue⁸,
combat misinformation⁹,
focus on district residents¹⁰,
reache non-voters¹¹, and
are archived and indexed¹².

Four U.S. candidates for state-level office tried out the Fireside Chat concept in the 2018 elections. Their forums did not catch on enough to become self-sustaining, but we learned from the experience how to market and grow future forums¹³.

Join the Conversational Democracy revolution! To get a Fireside Chat forum started for a particular race in the 2020 election, contact us on Twitter @FiresideChatPro.

Project Details - Click to Expand

[1] Increasing politicians' engagement

An important project goal is increasing politicians' role in educating citizens. In a ranking of where voters currently get information, surely “directly from their Representatives” would be near the bottom.

This is mainly due to gate-keeping at the scarce big platforms such as TV shows. Online Fireside Chats offer politicians (or candidates) an alternative platform where they can tackle as many questions as they have time for.

Although there will not be a large audience for their posts initially, telling constituents about the concept and how to participate is an easy and inexpensive way to build up an audience.

Although our democracy badly needs more politician engagement, this must be made in good faith to be a public good. Donald Trump has reaped tremendous political benefits for his innovative practice of bypassing gate-keepers by directly engaging with voters on social media. Unfortunately, Trump often posts false or misleading information - and many people naively believe him over media sources with editorial standards.

Unlike the big social media platforms, the volunteers running Fireside Chat forums have a sincere commitment to enforcing rules and doing so fairly. One such rule is that clearly false statements are subject to immediate moderator removal. The rules further state that any user with a practice of posting these would have posting privileges revoked after a few warnings.

(The full set of rules governing a Fireside Chat forum can be read below in [16].)

The related - but much more difficult - issue of how to handle misleading (but not obviously false) information is discussed below in [9].

[2] Increasing citizens' engagement

Another important project goal is to increase citizens' levels of civic engagement. Currently, far too many of the voters (about 85%) are better described as disengaged ‘identity voters’ rather than as well-informed ‘policy voters’.

We believe that if we post - at a nonpartisan site - easily-found sources of good-faith conversations about policy, this will assist citizens to

be more receptive to information outside their self-selected media bubble,
look more critically at biased or propagandizing sources of information,
be more open to candidates independent of their level of campaign funding,
make use of their Representatives to learn about policy and politics, and
factor policy more into their voting decisions.

Passive forum participation by reading or viewing interviews, or ranking questions, demands very little of constituents. Active participation - by posting questions and taking part in interviews - demands much more work. Fortunately, if just 0.1% of the voters actively participate, that one out of a thousand will be enough activity to ensure a steady stream of content.

One thing the Fireside Chat format does to make active participation attractive is to provide questioner anonymity. The default is that the questioner's name and voice will not be used in any posted interviews. This ensures that questioners don't have to worry about negative consequences if, for example, they have an unpopular opinion about a controversial issue.

It is useful to be more quantitative by ranking engagement levels on a scale based on civic activities :

Non-engagement: the citizen is law-abiding but otherwise inert in terms of government activity.
Votes, but does nothing to learn about politics or policy.
Votes and learns about politics, but gives no meaningful expression to a viewpoint.
Votes and learns, and also takes actions that reflect or propagate a viewpoint. Examples: discussing politics with neighbors, campaign contributions, contacting elected officials, commenting online.
Active in suggesting, evaluating and formulating policy.
Highest engagement: Decides directly on issues.

Engagement levels 1-2 are too low for representative democracy to work, and level 6 is too time consuming for citizens who have jobs (as previous experiments with citizen assemblies have made clear). Fireside Chat forums are intended to make it easy and enjoyable for citizens to meaningfully engage at the desired levels of 3-5. Passive forum participants (readers) are at 3, more active ones at 4 and 5.

Of course, the level of citizen engagement varies greatly with the importance and visibility of the office. About 60% of the US electorate vote during presidential election years, but this drops to about 50% during mid-term years, and only 20% vote in the elections held on odd-numbered years for local office holders and judges.

Fireside Chat forums for local offices have never been tried, but they are an intriguing idea to raise the visibility of these often obscure ofices.

[3] Democracy and voter-politician engagement

Fireside Chat forums foster frequent, meaningful and public interactions between politicians and ordinary (non-wealthy) voters.

In the US, despite the fact that it is intuitively obvious that representative democracy requires such interactions as part of a feedback cycle, they are infrequent and private. This state of affairs is shown schematically here:

Voter-politician engagement was discussed by the Founding Fathers, and ways of ensuring it were written into the Constitution. For example, the Founders required that representative live in their districts:

June 6, 1787 - Col. MASON. The people will be represented; they ought therefore to choose the representatives. The requisites in actual representation are, that the representatives should sympathize with their constituents; should think as they think, and feel as they feel; and that for these purposes they should be residents among them.

Many of the Founding Fathers, such as Adams and Gerry, were also proponents of very frequent elections as another mechanism for ensuring feedback:

June 12, 1787 - Mr. GERRY. The people of New England will never give up the point of annual elections. [...] He considered annual elections as the only defence of the people against tyranny. He was as much against a triennial house, as against an hereditary executive.

Madison's notes quoted above were private, but a public statement by him about how representation should work was published in 1788:

Federalist 56 : It is a sound and important principle that the representative ought to be acquainted with the interests and circumstances of his constituents.

In his honor, a deliberation model has been named after Madison, and it is useful for conceptualizing the role of a Fireside Chat forum in a Representative Democracy:

A Madisonian feedback cycle is a cycle of deliberation that allows citizens to cooperativelyformulate and communicate their general interests to their Senators and Representatives, whereupon legislators debate and craft policies to advance those interests, and then persuade their constituents of the (sometimes non-obvious) connection between the two, after which the process repeats itself in a cycle of feedback.

[4] Town halls and Fireside Chats

Because our democracy is currently functioning so poorly, there is a lot of interest in ways of fixing it. Our approach is to make more and better use of nonpartisan town hall events, and conduct them over the internet to improve participation and access.

This list shows eight popular existing town hall formats. Each of these is problematic in some way, and having more of them without modifying their format is unlikely to help much:

A less well known but very promising format is the ‘interactive town hall’ pioneered by Al Gore in 1994. The format was later refined into an ‘online town hall’ by the ConnectingToCongress organization, and has been shown in studies to be a format with significant benefits for both politician and voter participants.

The big problem of ‘online town halls’ is that they require a great deal of infrastructure and staff/participant preparation. Probably because of this they have never caught on; indeed, none have been held by members of Congress since 2008.

Fireside Chat forums have a similar format to ‘online town halls’ and thus should offer similar benefits. However, because they have much smaller resource requirements they should be easier to start up and keep going. Additionally, because they are archived they have the potential to have a greater relative impact.

[5] Canvassing and Fireside Chats

A staple of any political campaign is canvassing, the initiation of direct contact with voters. Fireside Chats work as a form of online canvassing, with the direct contact initiated by the voters via submitted questions.

Relative to real-life canvassing, online canvassing has some important advantages:

Social distancing and self-quarantining due to the COVID-19 pandemic currently make online interactions much more attractive than real-life ones.
Nearly one in five US adults live with a mental illness, and it is sadly common for politicians to be physically threatened or even attacked by mentally ill people. Online canvassing eliminates the risk of physical violence.
If a candidate randomly knocks on a door, the odds of somebody opening it with free time and also in the mood to chat about politics are poor. Voters will greatly prefer to initiate and conduct conversations online. And because Fireside Chats are not real-time chats, participants are never trapped at their computer.
If a candidate goes canvassing and has a good conversation with a voter, at best they gain one supporter from this. If the candidate instead has a good Fireside Chat, because it is posted afterwards they can potentially gain many supporters from voters who follow along after-the-fact.

Real-life canvassing has its advantages, of course, and a video reply is not a substitute for being in the same room with someone. Real-life and online canvassing are both needed, and they can be effectively used complimentarily:

a candidate who has met a potential supporter - but one who is undecided and not yet willing to become a follower of the candidate on partisan social media accounts - can invite the voter to a nonpartisan Fireside Chat forum to ‘keep the conversation going’,
a candidate who has an online presence at a nonpartisan Fireside Chat forum can use that platform to invite undecided voters to come to a partisan event, such as a local cafe meet-and-greet.

[6] Why direct contact with politicians?

Voters are starved for direct contact with their Representatives, communication unmediated by the media and other gatekeepers such as staff. Proof of this is provided by the popularity and huge impact of the @realDonaldTrump Twitter account.

At the present time it is common for staffers to tacitly foster the illusion that their politician employer writes their own social media posts. This is easily seen through, and most voters (rightfully) do not view social media accounts as providing direct contact with their Representatives.

Trump demonstrates that he is providing direct contact by often making statements that no staffer would dare post. This approach is only available to politicians willing to shock.

Fireside Chats provide demonstratively direct contact by having politicians reply to constituents via video. To broaden the impact of these videos, they are also transcribed to help with SEO and to reach voters who prefer to read instead of watch.

[7] Why forum moderation?

Moderation is needed because without clearly stated rules - and moderation to enforce them - the online places where questions are proposed and ranked would quickly become unreadable.

Fireside Chat forum rules are given below. These show that the main duties of moderators are:

facilitating new user registration
pruning off-topic, unintelligible, trollish or offensive posts
policing user misrepresentation
removing posts with obvious factual errors

Moderators are limited in what they can do to combat misinformation, as discussed below in [9].

[8] Why the focus on dialogue?

The Fireside Chat format encourages dialogue for multiple reasons.

Most topics are too complex for a Q&A; a back-and-forth discussion is required to meaningfully address the issues involved.
When politicians converse with media professionals it is almost always in an interview format. It is a natural extention for politicians to also have low-pressure interviews with constituents, and to make these public afterwards.
Dialogue/debate is often a more engaging and effective format than straightforward exposition. Some famous examples where complex issues are handled in an entertaining way: Plato's Socratic Dialogues, Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, and the Lincoln-Douglas Debates.
Misinformation and disinformation thrive in environments (like social media) where people quickly share sensational posts, and corrections can never catch up because they are less interesting. Because Fireside Chats are one-on-one conversations which are posted only after completion, they are much less susceptible to being hacked in this way.

Many people have written about the benefits of combining democracy with dialogue, to the point that one can identify ‘Conversational Democracy’ as a global movement, albeit mainly an academic one so far. Conversational Democracy is discussed more below in [15].

[9] Combating misinformation

Unlike simple errors of fact, misinformation and disinformation can't be easily moderated away because these often require significant time to research and refute. Fortunately, because of the emphasis on dialogue the members of a Fireside Chat forum can self-police these.

A posted constituent question which is dishonest, or is based on bad facts, will get comments pointing this out. This will educate the community about misinformation, and will reduce the ‘Likes’ the question gets so the participating politicians can ignore it if they wish - and ignoring misinformation is sometimes best to avoid unintentionally spreading it while refuting it.

A politician who gives a dishonest answer - intentionally or not - will get a follow-up question calling him on it. If he aspires to be an honest representative, he will take this feedback in stride and correct his statement. If he doesn't, his participation in the Fireside Chat Project will cease (voluntarily or not). Either of these two outcomes shut down the common ‘flood the zone’ and ‘censorship through noise’ strategies used by illiberal politicians to hack social media and the press (with great success).

[10] Why constituents only?

Questioners are limited to constituents because each Fireside Chat forum has a focus on the shared geography and localized politics of one particular electoral district. Users of the forum care a lot about the opinions of their neighbors; they (appropriately) care much less about the views of non-residents.

Limiting to verified constituents also creates an online space free from propagandists, trolls and fraudsters, whether automated or not. This is important because a Fireside Chat forum needs to be a trusted platform filled with real people to be effective.

A conservative estimate is that 40% of web traffic is fake. Fortunately, most of the fake accounts are automated and even the most basic gate keeping will block them.

The procedure for stringent verification is to have users privately submit (to site admins) their name, date of birth, and the county where they live. This information, which is not sensitive and is a matter of public record, can be used to look up whether the user is a real person registered on the appropriate voting roll.

Trolls are not likely to go to the effort to submit false IDs to post at the forum, given that this is a crime and the rewards are so low. However if the need arises, admins can look at other social media posts made from a suspect account to verify that they are consistent with district residence.

[11] Non-voters and Fireside Chats

Because of their hyperlocal focus, Fireside Chat forums will naturally contain information on locally very important - but nationally very obscure - subjects. As a consequence, the forums will get on the radar of even the most politically disengaged local residents.

Forum participation thus offers politicians a novel way to make contact with non-voters. This is a very numerous (~50% of the population) group, but one resistant to traditional messenging.

Even brief contact may help get them to the polls. As this graphic shows, some reasons for voting (“felt my vote would not count”, “didn't like candidate”) would be impacted by direct candidate contact.

Participant politicians also have a powerful message they can give to constituents who have tuned out of politics in frustration: “if you post a question for me, and it is a good enough one to get some likes, I will contact you for an interview. At the end of the conversation we may find that we are in agreement, or instead we may identify where we have to agree to disagree, but I promise that you will be heard.”

[12] Why archive and index at Wikisource?

Social media is great for reaching and connecting people, and thus for setting up Fireside Chats, but archiving completed interviews elsewhere is a necessity. This is because social media's ‘feed’ format, its closure to non-members and search bots, and its deletion of past content all makes finding old posts difficult when it is even possible.

Fireside Chat archives also need some form of indexing, so people can easily see if and when a topic has been discussed, and can click on a link to check out the conversation.

If archiving and indexing are done right, a Fireside Chat forum becomes more than ‘just’ an online town hall. They become an interactive public database focused on the concerns of a particular district - in other words a digital commons like Wikipedia.

This Google sheet was used to index the 2018 Michigan Fireside Chat forums. Afterwards we realized that Wikipedia's sister site Wikisource is ideal for archiving and cataloguing because it welcomes interview content, has good mobile device and search engine optimization, and is nonpartisan, well respected, and easy to use. Here are examples of Wikisource archiving and cataloguing of 2009 town hall content.

[13] Attracting readers and questioners

Four trial Fireside Chat forums were run in 2018, for Michigan State Senate Districts 19, 22, 32 and House District 71. Here are links to two social media groups for voters to post and read questions: Facebook, Twitter

We found that candidates and voters are very receptive to the concept, but we could not attract enough voter participation for these state-level forums to become self-sustaining. One reason for this is that the typical citizen has much less interest in state relative to federal elections.

We concluded that the best (only?) way to start a Fireside Chat forum up from nothing is to have candidates talk about them while doing real-life canvassing and giving speeches.

The idea is that when a candidate makes direct contact with undecided voter(s), they should finish up by inviting them to the nonpartisan Fireside Chat forum to ‘keep the conversation going’. They should also explain how it works, and point out some existing interviews as examples.

Once an interview is posted, search engine hits are a proven way to attract readers of it. Some of these readers will go on to become Fireside Chat participants who contribute to new interviews. These new interviews which in turn will attracts their own readers, and so on.

This cycle may seem familiar: it is how Wikipedia - a digital commons like the Fireside Chat Project - was able to grow from a single article in 2001 to over 6 million user-written articles in 2020.

Social media platforms are in general hostile to search engine bots, but Fireside Chats archived on Wikisource (which has good SEO) will have high rankings on Google searches because there are so few in-depth discussions focused around policy out there.

Of course, search engine hits only can reach ‘policy voters’ who actively Google information about issues. We also need to get on the radar of the ~85% of the voters who are ‘identity voters’ who rarely do this. A free way to reach them is to strongly encourage social media sharing wherever possible.

Advertising cost money, but some targeted social media ads might be worth it. This is because you can limit them so specifically - to only people living in the district and interested in a specific subject - that you don't have to buy many ads.

Fireside Chat project predecessors

Politicians, voters and academics have been experimenting with online political engagement since the advent of the web in 1991. The three main elements of Fireside Chats:

politicians directly participate,
at a nonpartisan platform, and
engage in dialogue with constituents,

are all familiar although combining all three elements is novel.

Vice President Al Gore’s 1994 ‘interactive town hall’ was a pioneering experiment where he directly (1) participated in an Ask-Me-Anything text chat on a nonpartisan (2) platform run by Compuserve.

The Congressional Management Foundation’s ‘online town hall’ project refined this approach, by (among other things) combining text questions with video replies and adding a single-topic focus. The ConnectingToCongress group conducted 21 such events, with 13 participating US Members of Congress, in 2006-8.

They made careful measurements of the impacts on the participants, which they found to be amazingly positive. They concluded that online town halls show great promise for strengthening our democracy.

There has also long been experimentation with online dialogue (3). The Minnesota e-democracy listserv discussion group began hosting citizen-to-citizen conversations in 1994, and has since evolved into the 50+ forums of E-Democracy.org which are used by about 30,000 citizens. To date, however, there has been very little participation in them by politicians.

Also very significant has been the partisan forums associated with US presidential campaigns, again citizen-to-citizen dialogue without direct involvement by the politicians. The 2004 Dean campaign for President, managed by Joe Trippi, was a pioneer of open forums and reaped a financial windfall as a result. The 2008 Obama campaign's social network was built up to 2.5 million activists and 13 million supporters at the time of his win.

Subsequently the Obama social network was neglected and withered away, and not much happened with US online voter engagement until 8 years later with Trump's innovative use of the Twitter platform:

Donald Trump received tremendous gains, at zero financial cost, through direct (1) participation on the non-partisan (2) Twitter platform.

Some progressive pioneers were aghast that an authoritarian had seized the initiative in e-democracy outreach:

Of course Trump's online voter engagement does not include any dialogue (3) aspects; these would be completely antithetical to his style as a politician.

In terms of these predecessors, the Fireside Chat project can be viewed as a combination of

the best elements of Social Media (timeliness, ease of use, existing connectivity),
with the best of Online Town Halls (direct contact, interactivity, ability to consider topics in depth, mutual fact checking, civility),
with a novel focus on one-to-one conversations similar to what one has in real-life canvassing.

Update: On March 14 2020 Bernie Sanders live-streamed a ‘Fireside Chat’, in part as a quarantine friendly replacement for a tradional campaign rally for his 2020 Presidential run. It had about 100,000 contemporaneous viewers, and the video of it has been seen over 170,000 times, so there is definitely an audience for this type of engagement.

Conversational Democracy

There has been a lot of interesting e-democracy work - theory, observation and experiments - since the start of the world wide web in 1991. Some of this makes the case for evolving towards a more ‘Conversational Democracy’ or ‘Consultative Representation,’ and these works in particular have helped shape the Fireside Chat Project.

These three short publications are a good introduction to the topic of Conversational Democracy, and are available online:

Direct Representation: Towards a Conversational Democracy, by Stephen Coleman (2005, pdf)
Extending the Public Sphere through Cyberspace: The Case of Minnesota E-Democracy, by Lincoln Dahlberg (2001, html)
Online Town Hall Meetings: Exploring Democracy in the 21st Century, by the ConnectingToCongress group (2009, html)

More information about the Fireside Chat concept, and its connection to Conversational Democracy, can be read at its (somewhat outdated) Participedia entry (2017) where it is labeled an ‘Electoral District Forum’.

Finally, some suggestions for additional reading in the Conversational Democracy literature are available here.

Fireside Chat forum rules

The below rules were used during the trial Fireside Chat forums run in Michigan in 2018. They are modeled after those used by the citizen-to-citizen forums run by E-Democracy.org, and will look familiar to anybody who has used an online discussion board in the past.

The rules are written with new users on a modern community platform (e.g. Dischord, Slack) in mind. It is obviously very crucial that existing accounts on the big social media platforms (e.g. Facebook, Reddit, Twitter) be included in some fashion. This will work but may require work-arounds of some type.

For example, if an existing reddit account is linked to a real person, one option to preserve anonymity is that the person create a second, anonymous account to interact at the relevant subreddit.

Community Rules (Short Summary)

Anonymity — The only information publicly visible is your username and political party affiliation (if any).
Real Names — You must provide your real name, date of birth, county of residence, and e-mail address to a Forum Moderators. This information will never be made public.
Limits on Posting — One new topic per member per day.
Keep Topics within Forum Purpose — Local issues on a local forum for example.
Be Civil — No name-calling. Respect among citizens with differing views is our cornerstone.
No Attacks or Threats — This keeps the forums safe. If content is illegal it will be forwarded to the proper legal authorities.
Private Stays Private — Don't forward private information without permission.
Avoid False Rumors — Asking for clarification of what you've heard in the community can be appropriate if issues-based. You alone are responsible for what you post.
Right to Post and Reply — Sharing your knowledge and opinions with your fellow citizens is a democratic right.
Items Not Allowed in Forums — No chain letters, etc.
Public Content and Use — You are sharing your content forever, but retain your copyright.
Warnings — You may receive informal or official warnings from the Forum Manager.
Suspension — With your fourth official warning in a 3 month period, you will receive a temporary ban. The length of the ban goes up from there.
Appeals Process — You can appeal a warning(s) once you receive a fifth warning and six month removal.

Community Rules (Full)

All forum members must identify themselves with their real first and last name, date of birth, and political party affiliation by accurately filling out their user profile. You are forbidden from registering with a pseudonym, anonymously, or using another person's identity.
Name and date of birth in the user profile can only be read by forum moderators. Members are welcome to use anonymous usernames to preserve their privacy.
Posts are to be made in the relevant forum. Users are asked to read the forum descriptions before posting. Users consistently posting to the wrong forum may be given a warning (see policing below).
Members should post in a way that is respectful of other users. Flaming or abusing users in any way will not be tolerated and will lead to a warning.
Personal attacks or public threats against the safety or security of participants are not allowed.
Forwarding private messages to a forum is not allowed without the express permission of the original author.
Your posts must be accurate based on your full knowledge and never intentionally false. You must correct your previous expressions of “known” information via the forum that you later find to be false or substantially incorrect.
Members are asked to not act as “back seat moderators”. If members note an issue which contravenes something in this policy document they are welcome to bring it to the attention of a member of the Moderator Team. Please use the “post report” feature to report posts. Do not respond to such topics yourself. Members who constantly “act” as moderators may be warned.
Members should remember this board is aimed at a general audience. Posting pornographic or generally offensive text, images, links, etc. will not be tolerated and will lead to a warning.
Members are asked to respect the copyright of other users, sites, media, etc. Users linking to or asking for information on warez, crackz, etc. or re-printing material without permission will receive a warning and their post will be removed.
The forums encourage public and open use of the content generated through community exchange online. By posting an original message, the author agrees to allow Fireside-Chat.org to distribute the message, image, video, or file via the Internet and to include it in a publicly accessible online archive in perpetuity. Unless an author specifically claims and lists a more restrictive copyright on content they created or own all posts and content shared via the public forums are usable by others under the Creative Commons with Attribution License to encourage broad use and public dissemination.
Members are asked only to post in English.
Members should respect the bandwidth of other users and sites. The use of inline image tags pointing to data stored on third party systems for which the user has not received permission to link to may be removed.
Members should post in a way which is consistent with “normal writing”. That is users should not post excessive numbers of emoticons, large, small or colored text, etc. Similarly users should not SHOUT or use excessive punctuation (e.g. ! and ?) in topic titles or posts. Users consistently abusing this will be warned.
Members should use an appropriate, descriptive subject when posting a new topic.
Members are welcome to use the practice area forum for general “test purposes”. These may include checking signatures, testing a link or image, etc. (subject to previous points on decency, warez, etc.).
Spam is not tolerated here under any circumstance. Users posting spam will be warned and their post removed.
The moderating, support and other teams reserve the right to edit, remove or put on moderation queue any post at any time. The determination of what is construed as indecent, vulgar, spam, etc. as noted in these points is up to Team Members and not users.
The above forum rules where applicable also apply to forum private messaging. Abuse of the private messaging system may lead to warnings (as above) and/or the revocation of private messaging.

Policing

PoliticanInterview operates with a three strikes policy. Users will be warned a maximum of three times for any and all offences in a three month period. If the need arises for a fourth warning a temporary ban will be put in place.
Arguing with team members after having received a warning will lead to an immediate additional warning. Should this exceed three strikes a temporary ban will be put in place as above.
Users who feel they have been unfairly warned are welcome to contact the relevant team leader, e.g. if warned by a moderator you should contact the Moderator team leader. If they feel you were treated badly they will remove a warning.
Any attempt to circumvent a temporary ban or other moderator action will lead to a permanent ban of your account(s). Circumvention includes re-registering or using an already registered account under a non-banned username. Other examples include changing IP addresses, using a new email account or other action that can be taken to evade moderator action to hide your identity as the owner of the sanctioned account.
An exception to the three strike rule applies when users contact team members personally (via any method) and post insulting, indecent or vulgar material. Such users may be subject to an immediate permanent ban.
Another exception is if you are found to have used a fake identity. Such users will be subject to an immediate 5-year ban.
Permanent bans are a last resort and thought is given before implementing them.

About the Fireside Chat project

The Fireside Chat project is nonpartisan, non-profit and grassroots-run. Its volunteers are working to create Fireside Chat forums because we strongly believe that non-partisan platforms for voters to meaningfully interact with politicians would be an important public good, and one which is badly needed at this bleak time in our democracy.

The project was first active in the 2016 US election cycle. One thing we did was to try to interest the Bernie Sanders campaign in updating the Fireside Chat tradition. His campaign ultimately saw the wisdom of our advice (hah!) and Sanders held one on March 14, 2020. In the 2018 election cycle we worked with four state-level candidates for office.

The project leader is Travis Mitchell, a retired professor of physics (research interests: non-neutral plasmas and 2D fluids) who resides in SE Pennsylvania. He can be contacted on Twitter @VoterVoices.

Welcome to the Fireside Chat Project!

Democracy must become a continuing conversation,

not just an occasional interview