The man behind the coalition

Although he prefers the term “advocate” to “activist,” there’s no doubt Chatham’s John Sigurjonsson found himself in the middle of the first municipal election fought on the social media front.

Sigurjonsson is the 78-year-old retiree who took it upon himself to start the online Citizen Coalition to discuss local municipal politics which ended up being the number one Facebook site devoted to the topic.

“It continued to evolve throughout the campaign,” he said of the closed group that had just over 1,000 members prior to the election. “For the most part, it was a very positive experience.”

There were some negative and personal attacks on candidates, rumours of candidates or their families posting under aliases and other operational issues.

Sigurjonsson said maintaining order on the page was sometimes a task, but it was worth the effort.

“I wanted to allow people to post both positive and negative comments, but when the personal attacks started, I had to delete some.”

He opened the site July 31 and estimates there were have been some 9,000 posts, and about three times that number in additional “likes.

“As a rough guess, I’d say we had 40,000 various expressions of opinion posts,” he said. “The vast majority was useful, some was not. “

A 50-year resident of Chatham, the Union Gas management retiree said he has been involved in advocating for biking and walking infrastructure for many years.

“I walk everywhere I can,” he said.

His interests grew to include the downtown core which he said needs to be revitalized in order to remain strong and relevant.

“I’ve seen the deterioration of the downtown core, and without a solid core our community suffers greatly,” he said. “I recently counted 26 vacant storefronts downtown and in many of those buildings the upper stories are vacant too. We need a strong downtown if we expect to have a strong community.”

Sigurjonsson said despite some of the negativity on his site, he remains optimistic about it and Chatham’s potential.

“I don’t lose any sleep over it (the negativity). It comes with starting the site.”

He said his only motivation for starting and maintaining the site is community engagement.

“I’m not in this for me,” he said. “I believe although it may seem at times as though we’re fighting a losing battle against apathy, we can still turn things around.”

Members continue to join the group, now with 1,039 participants.

“Our next goal is to begin posting information about council agendas as soon as it becomes available, “he said. “We want to encourage people to be involved in their community, not just at election time but all year round.”

He said he will be adapting moderating guidelines used by the Toronto Star to help manage those who get out of line.

“The overriding idea is that we’re here to discuss ideas, not attack people,” he said. As long as we can stick to that, we will be fine.”