It turns out all that time you spent on Facebook was no waste at all, at least for members of the Boundary Neighbourhood Watch group. The group was selected to attend the 2019 Facebook Communities Summit in Menlo Park, California, at Facebook Headquarters. Admin Christopher Stevenson says he has a list of community groups, including Boundary Neighbourhood Watch, which he created intending to bring the region together.
Stevenson says he applied for the invitation, and there is a lot behind their decision:
“I think people need to know that Facebook chose the group, and chose the discussions, and chose the way that people conducted themselves, and this wasn’t Facebook just choosing the Admin of the group. This was Facebook looking at the group, and they looked at what we built here in The Boundary and in Grand Forks, and selected that to be one of 220 attendees out of… I figure there’s 66 million admins in the world.”
He adds that number is an estimate. He also explains what he’ll experience when he goes:
“It’s gonna [sic] be a couple days of learning and seeing what other people are doing with their groups, trying to figure out different ways of doing things, better ways of dong things, submitting feedback and having discussions so that we’re giving our feedback on how Facebook could work better. Then I’ve also been invited to lead a panel discussion on crisis and disaster recovery in the context of how social media plays into that.”
Stevenson suspects that specific offer is related to the group’s activity during last year’s flooding, and the Rock Creek fire of 2015.
He says the platform offers a unique and direct line for communication:
“Somebody puts a call out that a house is flooding and 30-40 people show up to human-chain their possessions out of their house.”
Stevenson adds that the Facebook groups that were invited will vary:
“There isn’t one or one small group of topics or focuses that they’re looking at, I’ve seen groups on all kinds of things, for support groups for certain kinds of medical conditions, to groups for what we’re doing, community safety.”
He says he only expects the platform to continue growing. To visit the group click here.