Opening up the eHealth Forum, starting with Events

Over the next few months, some of the eHealth Forum will be gradually opened up to the public. This will be done carefully and slowly, with utmost respect for the privacy of our members and their discussions.

The reasons for doing this are:

  1. Providing service to the wider community (especially with events)
  2. Making the eHealth Forum more discoverable
  3. Widening the range of people who participate in quality discussion about digital health in Aotearoa NZ.

We will begin with the new events category as a bit of a test bed. We’ll check with authors of all relevant posts before making the category public. There will be visual cues and warnings that the content is public.

In the future, we’ll consider doing something similar for other categories which are naturally suited to wider exposure (such as #emerging, #general:news, and standards).

A more extensive landing / homepage will be one of the secondary benefits of this approach. This will help on many fronts.

One casualty of doing this is the Users Map. Unfortunately, it can’t currently be configured to only be visible to a subset of people. If people really want that, we could pass the hat around to find the funding needed for the dev work required.

We welcome any suggestions or comments about this initiative.

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I’m delighted to report that we now have three areas open to the public:

  1. Public
  2. Events
  3. Emerging Tech

These have been implemented in a way that protects those who have not yet given consent for their content to be exposed more widely. This is achieved by Logged-in Only and Logged-in Only, which are only visible to those logged into the eHealth Forum.

Please let us know as a reply here (or privately to @moderators or me) if you have any concerns or suggestions about our opening up.

Also, if any of you have influence over a health or digital website - we’d love to have a link to / feature about the eHealth Forum on it. This will improve our SEO enormously, and make it easy for people to find our content.

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