Announcing the 2015 OP Candidate Forums

The editors of OrangePolitics are excited to announce our live online candidate forums for the upcoming elections for the Hillsborough Town Board, the mayor of Chapel Hill, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Board of Education and the Chapel Hill Town Council. 

All the details, including our moderators and calendar for this year's cycle are below.

Moderators

• Local journalist Amanda VanDerBroek, staff reporter for and soon-to-be editor of the News of Orange, will serve as the moderator of the Hillsborough Town Board forum.
• Freelance journalist Lisa Sorg, former editor in chief of Indy Week, will serve as the moderator of the Chapel Hill mayor and Chapel Hill Town Council forums.
• UNC law professor Barbara Fedders, a specialist in youth justice whose scholarship focuses on the intersection between school exclusion laws and policies and involvement in the juvenile and criminal justice systems, will serve as the moderator of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro School Board forum.

Dates

• Hillsborough Board of Commissioners: September 27, 7-9 p.m.
• Mayor of Chapel Hill: October 4, 7-9 p.m.
• Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools Board of Education: October 11, 7-9 p.m.
• Chapel Hill Town Council: October 18, 7-9 p.m.

Each forum will consist of a real-time written conversation between the candidates and the moderator. Questions for the forums will be solicited from OrangePolitics readers both before and during the forums. As with our previous candidate forums, the moderator will have final say in question selection. The forums will take place online here on our site, with one evening dedicated to each race covered.

We ecnourage to observe each forum and to participate in a simultaneous, separate blog thread where you can discuss the forum and propose follow-up questions. OP editors will monitor this discussion in real time and feed readers' questions and follow-up topics to the moderator. Candidates will also be encouraged to ask each other questions and to comment on each others' responses.

Now is the time to start suggesting forum topics and questions. You can make your suggestions via comments on this blog post, the OP contact form, Twitter and Facebook.

For more information about the 2015 election, visit the election section of OP for important dates and more at http://www.orangepolitics.org/elections-2015.