With my listmother hat on I'd just like to back up what Kathleen has already
written about posting about conferences and advertising.
I know it's a loooong time ago that many of us joined Lactnet and so for
some of us it can be difficult to remember the guidelines (I had a memory
jolt last year when I revised them, I needed it!) but the guidelines clearly
state that conference postings and advertising are not appropriate. This may
seem a little harsh, after all, all of us clearly love learning about
breastfeeding (otherwise why would we be on Lactnet) and so many of us also
probably enjoy conferences.  However, Lactnet is a very large list (3000
subscribers) and is global forum. There are many many conferences/seminars
on breastfeeding world over and any one of them has limited usefulness to us
all as a group, just because of geography. For instance, our local
breastfeeding coalition has a conference next week and in a few weeks I'll
be speaking at another. Now I am sure that many of you would love to hear
Sue Cox speak at our local conference but not many of you are within cooee
of the NSW Central Coast and I'd like to think that some of you would like
to hear me speak, but how many of you are in Melbourne?? It's pointless to
post about conferences and if we had messages about every one there was it
would unnecessarily clog up the list. Lactnet is already a high volume list
and we don't want to make it even more difficult for people to keep up with
the postings. That's the rationale behind the guideline. Now sometimes
somebody forgets, and posts to the list about a conference. Usually, when
this happens one of the listmothers will simply post a message to them
privately just to remind them that conference announcements are
inappropriate on Lactnet. No big deal is made.

Same goes for advertising. Now I know that many of us do not make any money
out of lactation and in fact for some of us it is a very expensive hobby! I
fit into this category myself for while I have an academic position at a
university it's an honorary one. My funding source for research is called
Aaron Gribble. One day I hope that I will be able to pay some bills with
what I do but in the mean time I plod along without financial support. But
again, we want to keep the number of messages sent to Lactnet to a
manageable level and to discussions that are relevent, helpful and
stimulating. So again, the no advertising rule. If someone asks a question
about something and a book, product that you know about might be helpful it
is perfectly OK to post about this and add a link if one is available.
However, if you have a personal interest you must state this. I did this
just today when I posted about the ABA Relactation and Adoptive
Breastfeeding. I wrote this booklet and it would be wrong of me to send a
post just to advertise it to Lactnet, even though I have no financial
interest in it whatever. However, I do think that it might be helpful to the
mum in the situation that had been described and so I posted about it.
Sometimes this one can be a bit difficult in the outworkings and if you are
not sure whether something you would like to post should be sent to Lactnet,
please run it by the listmothers. We're only too happy to have a look at it
for you and we're really very nice! We're conveniently spread around the
time zones of the world and so should be able to get back to you promptly.
Again if someone accidently posts something that is inappropriate they may
get a gentle reminder that such posts are inappropriate for Lactnet and we
really expect that people will respect the guidelines that we all run by
(listmothers included!) and not deliberately ignore  the guidelines.

I hope this makes sense.

Karleen Gribble
Australia

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