The Small Voices Message Board

for members of the UK Federation of Smaller Mental Health Agencies

Representing the Unrepresented
 Need some help? Try these links or email messagehelp@ontheside.org

Frequently asked questions

(there is lots more help on the Smart Group help pages, which you will see when you join)

Q1: Why do you discourage personal questions?

Because it is our members who have the experience and skill to provide a personal service not the UK Federation.which was set up to assist groups and especially on matters on which a number of them share concerns. An important aim is to establish policies on generally agreed matters. There are many specialised groups open to all some with many hundreds of members and thousands of messages, and an individual can register with these.for a greater chance of help on a specific problem. We would encourage members to tell us when they find a useful external message board as we do not wish to duplicate other people's services . However it is more than possible that a personal query to this board will be one that one of our members feels they can help with. are individuals

Q2: When should I send an attachment and when upload a file?

An attachment is easier, and can be sent when you are emailing rather than by getting your browser to access the web features. So it is suitable for one off things such as copies of documents individuals have shown an interest in. If these documents are likely to be of importance for some considerable time, they can be retrieved from the message history but quite often people will not know which message they came with, so putting into the file system is better though it takes longer and you have to be careful with names. From time to time we will reorganise the file folders to make retrieval easier.

Q3: Why has it taken so long to get this message board set up?

Sadly, we are only human. When we had Lottery funding there was not as great a need since we were using paper communications such as Hot News and the Small Voices newsletter. These went to all members, an advantage that we cannot claim for the web and email services. Following the end of Lottery funding we were not well resourced and even setting up our email list took a great deal of effort from Jenny Maguire and Bob Axford. It was hoped that limited funding would soon be received and indeed this fund raising took priority. Anyway, we have the facility now - please use it! And do help us to avoid a two tier membership system, by telling your friends and sharing information locally where you can.

Q4: Will people be able to see and use my email address?

We are currently planning to let all members view the full list of members. We cannot hide their email address on this list. If enough members ask us to make this list hidden, when we have a vote on this, then this would not be a problem. If you have an alternative email address which is less easily traced to you personally (such as blueeyedmonster@aol.com) then you could use that, but you will have to use it when posting messages to the group or using the web features.

Your email will not be visible in the message you post, which is very important because we currently allow our messages to be visible to non members, though non members will not be able to post messages. This policy too will be put to a member vote in due course.

Q5: Can a UK Fed member register more than once on the group?

We appreciate that more than one individual in their member group might wish to post messages and that having to do this via the same email might be inconvenient. So for the moment we will allow multiple registrations with different email addresses for the same member group. When a request is received we will ask you to identify the group you belong to and we will check it with the member group. This is so that when there are votes we don't give one group any more votes than another, and when there are important votes only the main email address will be treated as voting. If we find this takes too much work from our volunteers we may need to review the decision.

We would suggest that a different Smart Group password is used for each email address.