congratulations on your new role at Making Waves. That sounds like a really good partnership which I hope we can benefit from. I had tried calling you a while back and the email I had failed for you, just to let you know that we still are waiting to hear about the honorary award for this year. Fingers still crossed!

ooooh great Matt - well it was an honour to be asked - whether or not I receive the accolade - thank you all for nominating me - its good to be here at MW and hope we can help you at Nottingham Trent - shall we meet up soon??

Hello Julie,

Welcome to the MHHE hub.  Feel free to post, use the various functions and explore the site.  The hub is a great way of posting across the 300+ members as well as advertising events, taking part in our chat sessions, discussions etc.I see already you're in touch with folk here- great!

Best

Bill

Thank you very much Julie - I'm delighted to link with you :-) Your poster is great - quite inspirational: I'm still laughing!! ;-)

Janie

Thanks Julie, me too!

Anne

Thanks for adding me too Julie, hope you're doing well!

Thanks Julie, for all that you are doing to make things more interactive on the mhhehub! 

Dear Julie,

I am retired from teaching so do not actually use my service user experience in that way, though I have been on various focus groups and research groups through 'Suresearch', a group in Birmingham.  I feel it would be expanding your remit too wide to join the group under these circumstances though I will be interested to read what people have to say if that is available.  Thanks,  Duncan

Hi Julie - good to link up with you

cheers

Thurstine

Hi Julie,

I have a poetry book published called Aspects of Life by chipmunkapublishing.com.I found writing to be very therapeutic and it helped enormously with my recovery.I am involved with Recovery through the Arts workshops at B.ham uni. with social work students.I also attend a readers' and writers' group which is a subgroup of Suresearch at the university.

Janet

Hi Julie.  Great that you have set up the 'My Mad Space' group.  Did you know that you can change the privacy settings, if you want to, so that only the group details are visible to the wider hub membership (discussion is only visible to group members)?.  You do that from the edit function on the group homepage.  It has advantages and disadvantages of course - allowing for confidential discussion but preventing others from learning from it (though the latter could perhaps be got around by making some more public postings too). Have just been looking in to whether there is a way to 'hide' group membership but we don't seem to have that feature.  Happy to explore/discuss more as the group evolves.

Hi Julie.  On a ning network it seems that you have to be friends with someone before you can send them a private message. 

There's some information here: http://www.ning.com/help/?tag=private-messages

You can use the comment feature - eg to ask them to send you their email address - but then it isn't private of course.

Hi Julie - further to my last message. . . This is clearly a major bone of contention for ning users.  See: http://creators.ning.com/forum/topics/allow-members-to-send-private?id=4244211%3ATopic%3A291240&page=1#comments (there are seven pages of responses!).

Thanks for your interest Julie.Your work sounds amazing.

Janet

Hi Julie

Just to say that am giving a bit of thought to the confidentiality issues - quite take your point that academics and students (and others) may not wish to disclose.  Will let you know what I come up with. . .

Jill

Hi Julie. 

Have checked out options and it does seem that there is no way to hide group membership.  My sense is that anyone who is already using their own experience in teaching will be comfortable in joining a public group.  The difficulty is with someone who may feel unable to do so (as they don't wish to disclose to colleagues/university authorities) but does want space to explore the issues. 

One possibility would be to add a note to the group description encouraging people in that position to message you directly - you could then put them in touch with other group members. I imagine that kind of private one to one discussion may be v helpful to them.  The chat function can also be used for completely private chats between hub members.  The other thing you can do is to schedule a group chat on the hub - anyone can join and the record of the chat can be erased afterwards (but it will be visible for the duration of the chat, which may be off-putting for some). 

Another possibility would be to amend the description of the group somehow so that it would, in theory, be possible to be a member without the implication being drawn that one identifies as 'mad' oneself - although I can well see that might muddy the message and purpose of the group. . .

For a completely private forum (ie one where the members, and outsiders, do not know one another's identity) then I think you'd have to move to Google groups or Yahoo (which I hope you won't do as it is great to have a group of this kind on the mhhehub!) or to have a linked email discussion group there.

Happy to discuss/explore further.

Thank you Julie. I look forward to sharing with you too :-)