99NICU - the online neonatal community reclaimed

We are approaching the 20 year anniversary of 99NICU and while thinking about our journey, we also came to explore the wider scope, including the feeling of a lost online neonatal community.

When I first helped build 99NICU in 2006, it came from a very simple need: a safe place to talk about neonatal care with other health care professionals. Not just to exchange information, like over email, but create a community space to think, question and learn together from real clinical experience. At the time, those kinds of conversations were harder to find online, due to the immature technology. Today, that challenge feels even more familiar, but for other reasons.

Many of us now rely on large social media platforms for professional connection. They’re convenient, fast, and always there. But they were never designed for careful clinical discussion. Algorithms decide what gets seen, conversations disappear as quickly as they appear, and the focus is often on confirmation and engagement (likes!) rather than substance. For neonatal care, where nuance, trust, and context matter, that model simply doesn’t work very well.

99NICU was created as an alternative to that. From the beginning, it has been built by neonatal professionals, for neonatal professionals, with no commercial agenda driving the conversations. We have a non-profit structure because independence matters.

What makes me most proud, all these years later, is not the platform itself, but the community behind it. Moderators, developers, and contributors are all volunteering NICU staff, colleagues who care deeply about neonatal care and about maintaining an online space where knowledge grow over time.

99NICU is not “social media” in the usual sense. It is a professional community reclaimed — a shared space we collectively own and shape.

Last but not least, being independent implies that we need support in a crowd-funding way. Please consider to donate 10 EUR per year to keep our servers running, visit this page to do it today!