did everyone know the department of health is 'in partnership' with Mumsnet?

[edam]

Apparently the government is working in partnership with MN to 'allow users to provide feedback' on maternity care.

According to a govt plan for the NHS over the next five years 'NHS 2010?2015: from good to great.'

I didn't know about this - anyone else? MN HQ?

Sounds like a jolly good idea but not sure posters consider themselves 'partners' of the government...

Thanks Justine, sounds very sensible. And potentially a whole lot more useful than the standard patient surveys and tick box 'ooh, we've consulted patients' stuff.

Hmm I just disagree I'm afraid. The miscarriage code quite simply would not have been if it hadn't been for the MN usership and the frankly appalling treatment of many, many members detailed on these boards. The code of practice was not our (MNHQ's) idea. It was an idea that came up on a thread and was widely supported. The ten points in it were suggested and honed by members on a discussion thread. There was, as I recall not one voice of dissent in the entire time it was being discussed and it was discussed at length. We have a great many emails from members saying how pleased they are that MN is airing this issue. You're never going to get every Mumsnet user endorsing anything but you can have a pretty good idea if something is representative of how our members feel by having a debate and seeing if there is any dissent.

I have to say it would feel disingenuous (!) to claim that this campaign was conceived by MNHQ. It was absolutely inspired by, conceived by, and widely endorsed by Mumsnetters.

We are - perhaps for a very short time indeed - in a position, where it feels like we have the luxury of the ear of those in power. To do nothing I think would be wrong and to claim the issues we have focused were our idea at MNHQ would be a lie.

And incidentally, we have only ever represented MNetters views - not our own. We always tell the meedja that we are merely mouthpieces for the board - I don't go on radio Solent and say "I think this and I think that" I say "Well on MN the majority are saying this, or some people are saying this and some people that". That's the way it's always been.

bibbity

Actually I have it in my mind from an old thread (perhaps I am wrong?) that you are acquainted with a certain actor of Pride & Prejudice fame?? So actually I have been deliberately tailoring all my posts to serve you, in the hope that you can arrange some sort of ... reward. I would like to say that I look a little bit Italian and would travel without expenses. (This will seem very weird if that was some other poster altogether.)

Ha ha - tis me!

x-post Justine. Yes, absolutely re the miscarriage code. But I thought that pre-dated the recent, new campaigns initiative. The reason for my concern is that there is a new departure -- in the past you have (very helpfully and constructively) taken up campaigns that have spontaneously emerged from threads. Now there is a new, centrally led campaigning initiative. It is exactly that contrast between bottom-up and top-down campaigning that I feel needs to be clear.

It isn't because the campaigns themes aren't highly consensual. I'm sure that they are very well supported indeed. I suppose for me it is just the acknowledgement that your decisions are naturally going to be taken on the basis of your social objectives and your business imperatives combined. That 'double bottom line' is the nature of social enterprise. Users aren't privy (and shouldn't be privy) to your busisness considerations, which naturally condition your actions to some extent some of the time. E.g. I absolutely hate and detest the intense media interest of the past few weeks, but of course as owners of the site you can't but seek to maximise that sort of publicity (and not just for your campaigning goals).

oh good bibbity. Send him round!

Well I was at a quango meeting today and was told that the NCT are in partnership with mumsnet...

But MN's core philosophy (or mission statement if you will) is to "Make parents' lives easier". So of course we want to get out there - we always have - we think MN is great and (on the whole) makes folks lives easier. We have never shied away from publicity for MN.

But no one was listening about miscarriage until the recent surge in political and press interest. Now they are - so it's not all bad.

elliot NCT have been in partnership for aaaaaages

sometimes if you log out wrong the NCT logo comes up, like a wormhole to another, scarier dimension

I don't get your points thready - why do you think the campaigns is coming from central office? The thread is there, it is nice and vague, stuff comes up organically as far as I can see (e.g. Riven's nappy issues). I don't know why you think it is being manipulated (is that what you mean?).

and most of the mechanisms that the NHS/Government has for 'end user feedback' are a LOT shittier than Mumsnet. They spend squillions of pounds trying to solicit views but there are only ever 4 people who turn up for any public consultation and 1 of those meant to go to the Rotary next door

We do have a partnership of sorts with the NCT, Elliot. They link to our forums from their site - we give them a bit of dosh for everyone they send us.

No, MP not manipulated. I don't think anyone is cynical remotely.

I can't bring myself to go through it again to try and state my concerns more clearly. No one seems to share them anyway.

See, that's just how I feel on those Other Woman threads

This is interesting. How is it working in practice that they are "allowing users to provide feedback"? Are they just looking at threads or giving us surveys or something else?

I'm a bit baffled by it all but agree with Deadworm/Threadbreast (good name btw) that whatever partnerships are put in place or campaigns undertaken there needs to be clarity about it.

Are there posters on here from the Department of Health too? I had thought that Musukebba was posting on behalf of the DoH on vaccination/swine flu issues, but perhaps he/she could confirm if around.

You plus one thready. But I fully acknowledge that no-one else seems bothered. How odd.

I ruddy well hope so, Zeph, maybe then they will notice that most docs and HVs and midwives know fuck-all about breastfeeding, for instance.

They might even have picked up that something was very wrong with maternity services at Milton Keynes general (if IIRC there was a thread about it) rather than waiting for a coroner to point out three babies have died thanks to a dreadful shortage of midwives and resulting crap, dangerous care.

(Although apparently there were more midwives on shift at MK when the most recent baby died than there were when I gave birth at St Thomas's. Am very grateful ds and I didn't turn into mortality statistics - there but for the grace of God and all that.)

Yay bibbity.

Now I want to look at the Other Woman threads to see what you have been saying there MP. Are you a lone pro-Other-Woman voice?

I think that MN consults very authentically with the people it does manage to reach on threads -- on the Campaigns thread for eg, and on this thread. I appreciate Justine speaking here, correcting the number on the campaign page and acknowledging the user/member distinction.

It is only that it can really only reach a tiny number of people in informal consultation on threads, and I thought that the high media profile MN managed to cultivate a few weeks ago threatens to give it an influence that far outstrips its capacity to be a genuinely representative organisation. (It is non-representative on political webchats also since inevitably just a few posters are involved and the media runs with whatever suits it.) That influence is potentially a good thing, but also potentially a bad thing -- if govt or opposition just exploit it for vote-grabbing gimmickry. It shouldn't be billed as a influence whose legitimacy originates in its 270k usership.

lol @ being pro-other-woman

TBH after a half of shandy I quite fancy my OWN other woman....

However I think I'm generally sitting around shouting: "Leave the poor boys alone! Aren't we all allowed a little out-of-home fondle occasionally?"

hmmm not sure that's a very good summary actually, I'm sure it's more nuanced

lol MP. You see this is what I like about MN. Where else could you meet a post-shandy-bisexual, anti-swearing, guru-libelling, nuanced-adultery-defending, trans-denominational Christian website designer? Nowhere. That's where.

that's practically my CV

I appreciate the changes that you have made to the campaigns page, Justine, particularly the deletion of the portion beginning "Mumsnet is a community and is not a lobby group ..."

I notice that you are still going with the unique monthly visits to define the scope of your user base, which is a bit misleading. E.g. by that token I am a 'user' of an army chat site, since I landed there when I googled 'British Army water bottles' for DS2's Christmas list.

oops, sorry, my mistake. You've kept that bit, which is on a different page, which also favours the word 'members'.

Oh and that thing about being a 'mouthpiece' for MN in media interviews, etc., that bugs me. Though I am sure that MNHQ strive to represent MNers views accurately in interviews, I recoil at the idea of them being posters' mouthpiece. MN is just a pub I like to drink in. I know the landlady will want to talk to the local papers about her pub, because she is rightly proud of it and because she wants more customers, but she is still the landlady and not my spokesperson.

Though I know it isn't confidential here, I don't want to post in order to have my views conveyed to the media, and increasingly it has seemed that that is what is expected of me.

With the exception of campaigns issues where posters actually ask MNHQ to represent them, publicity interviews are MNHQ's affair, not a service for users. In fact, it has increasingly seemed over the last few months that posters are regarded as a service for HQ's press and broadcast publicity. Hardly anyone except me seems to care much about this so I think it is probably time for me to just say 'So long and thanks for all the fishwives.'

Thanks, Lenin. I think you are right that people are tired of it, and also about how polarised and unpleasant it became over the DM thing. This thread has been really good tempered and accomodating, I think,

Like you 'I just want to chat to people really and benefit from their experience and offer mine where I can.' I thought that was what MN was. But the site is becoming something more than that. And the campaigns thing (naturally a good enough thing in itself) has been used to give a blanket justification to a rather intensive courting of the media. It was even used to give respectibility to the Daily Mail frivolity column. I had hoped that the campaigns would be set up with some sort of separate structure from the main talkboard, precisely to avoid it giving what I think is a spurious justification for excessive publicity. But this didn't happen, and I think that the resulting soup of conversations among users on the one hand and invited media attention on the other is unattractive -- to me, perhaps not to others. I've tried to leave before and failed. but it is probably time I left.