Inside LabourStart

Campaigns: The Bangladesh campaign is one of our very largest, with over 14,000 messages sent — we got a big boost from the British TUC which did an image that went viral and brought a lot of attention the campaign. We will probably close this soon as IndustriALL and UNI have made a lot of progress this week.

The Hong Kong campaign closed and we’ve asked about closing the Mexico campaign after three months — waiting to hear from IndustriALL about that one. We asked the RMT in the UK if we could close the “Justice for the 33” campaign and have been asked to continue to run with it for another month or so.

In addition to publicizing our own campaigns, we were asked to do mailings and promote Amnesty International’s new campaign in support of releasing jailed Bahraini teacher Mahdi, which we did. We also did a special promotion on Fiji for the Australian Council of Trade Unions and the ITUC.

On the technical side, we fixed some of the German text, got an Indonesian ActNOW newswire working, and have made more progress on the new campaigns database which will make our translators’ job considerably easier.

News home pages: Edd’s been working on some of the more complex language home pages which have not yet been moved over to the new format (Dutch, Polish); Eric will be completing work on the French version in the next few days. We fixed a lot of things on the country pages this week, including how campaigns appear (now showing the photo from the most recent campaign and horizontal lines to separate them); news stories that appear in the top 10 don’t repeat in the stories below; when a state/province/region appears in the headline (e.g., England), it now appears in a different colour (as it does in the list of stories); there’s now an ad for the new book on all the country pages in English; the “for more info” link now appears again on all stories where there’s something in that field.

Book 2: Sales are going well; we’ve sold 180 copies — 156 of them this week. We’ll begin work on a Kindle edition this week. Matt H. has volunteered to work on a German edition of this (and the previous book).

Berlin/Vancouver 2014: Edd’s been in touch with some German comrades and we’re making slow and steady progress. Derek is talking to comrades in Canada about a global solidarity conference there as well.

Mailing list: We had a problem with the latest version of our Sendy software — it was screwing up character encoding. This was now fixed.

CloudFlare: The adoption of CloudFlare, which we pay to ensure that our site is accessible everywhere at an improved speed, and which will keep us going even if we go offline for a while, has caused some teething pains. One of them was a delay in seeing the new photo of the day, which Derek has been posting. This has now been fixed.

Today in Labour History: I noticed that the word ‘more’ would appear even when there was no more; this has now been fixed. We have a lot more stories in the database now and a big thanks to Andy for translating so many of them into French.

Fund-raising: The ITF has pledged to donate something, and we’re expecting a donation from the RMT as well, which voted at its conference last year to support LabourStart. In addition, we’ve put in requests for grants for specific purposes to two UK-based charities — the Lipman-Miliband Trust and the Edge Fund.

May Day Party: Considering that this was the first time we’ve tried a real-world fundraiser, it has to be considered a success. The party was held on Saturday night at the Bread & Roses pub in Clapham, south London. David Cockroft, the outgoing general secretary of the ITF, spoke, as did Kirill Buketov of the IUF. (Cockroft’s speech was videoed and we’ll make it available when we have it.) In addition, we had speakers from the “3 Cosas” campaign organizing London cleaners and the RMT “Justice for the 33″ campaign, and two entertainers — Dave Thorpe and The Ruby Kid. There were about 45 people there, and we raised £300 for LabourStart. Next year, let’s have LabourStart May Day fundraisers in a dozen cities around the world – start planning yours today.

Books 1, 2 and 3: The global labour movement – an introduction has now been published, we have 100 copies here in London, and today we’ll begin publicity. My personal goal is to sell more copies of this than book 1 (Campaigning online and winning) — we’ve distributed about 769 of those, of which 725 are actual sales. Andy has begun work on a French translation already. We already have plans for a third book — selected essays by former IUF general secretary Dan Gallin. One of those essays almost went into Book 2, but we felt it was more suited to a collection of Dan’s writings, which he’s agreed we can publish. His articles have appeared in book form in French and Russian, but not yet English. We’re putting in a request for financial support to do this to the Lipman-Miliband foundation.

Campaigns: We closed the KMU Philippines campaign after more than 3 months online. The Bangladesh campaign is already one of our largest with 10,649 messages sent as of this morning. We’re about to close down the last remaining UK-only campaign for the RMT. I’ve made steady progress on the transition to a MySQL database for campaigns – we can now show campaigns and add new ones, and we can migrate all campaigns from the old system. As I’ve mentioned before, this will not only lead to a more robust and secure system, but it will be MUCH easier for translators to do their work. It’s a big project and should take a couple more weeks to complete, including thorough testing.

LabourStart country pages: We’ve made a lot of improvements to the LabourStart Canada page and have much more work to do on others, such as the UK page.

Today in Labour History: Edd and others are working very hard to ensure that there’s something every day on the main global page and something every month for each of the key countries. This is an ongoing project and every LabourStart correspondent is invited to help out.

The Global Labour Movement – An Introduction: We completed work on this book which is now with CreateSpace. We’ll soon be approving the proof and will begin selling the book by May Day.

New site design: This is now working in 24 of our 29 languages. It’s also working for all country pages in English as well as the state/province pages.

CloudFlare teething problems: It turned out that we really needed to tell CloudFlare about all our sub-domains, even the ones that they are not handling with their proxy servers. Once that was done, everything seems to have settled down.

Campaigns – new: At the request of the ITF, we launched a second campaign within a week, this time in support of workers in the Port of Vancouver, Washington. With 8,457 supporters, it’s already larger than the Hong Kong campaign (8,235).

Campaigns – renewed: The ITUC asked us to give the Turkey campaign another big push. We did. It went up from 11,098 to 12,549 in the last five days.  The KMU also asked us to reopen their campaign for a few more days and we’ve done so.

Campaigns – closed: At the request of the RMT, we’ve closed the Churchill’s campaign, which the workers have won, and the Bakerloo campaign as well. I’ll be closing the Korea campaign tomorrow, after 3 months online. It’s had 10,540 supporters.

Campaigns – overhaul: There is a VERY long list of things to do here, and I’ll be trying to make some progress every day on the list. Starting with the migration of our old flat database to a proper MySQL database. This should make the campaigns work faster, be more stable, easier for translators to do their work, etc.

May Day party in London: We have over 215 people who either say they are coming or may be coming; this is very good. We’ll have entertainers and guest speakers from a couple of London disputes, as well as the general secretary of the ITF. Details here.

Fundraising: I put in a proposal to a UK-based funding group which supports social change, the Edge Fund . We won’t know until July if our application is successful.

The UK was the first, but now all country pages in English work on the same model.

For example, see Canada, the USA or Australia.

The state/province pages under these work fairly well with the new format – see, for example, Ontario or New South Wales.

On the main country pages, the upper left column is reserved for country-specific content.  In the UK page, for example, we’re listing some May Day events at the moment.  For Canada, we’ll soon be showing logos of unions that support LabourStart.

The Canadian LS page in French is nearly complete and we’ll soon link to it.

I welcome your comments and suggestions.

The biggest news:

I just set up CloudFlare as a way of ensuring that LabourStart stays online no matter what.  It should also theoretically really speed up the display of our site, anywhere in the world.  It should kick in sometime in the next 48 hours.  If LabourStart suddenly becomes unusable  that probably means I did something wrong with the setup. In that case, please email me making sure not to use a labourstart.org address — email me at [email protected], which will get through.  Make sure you note that email address now, as this blog will also become inaccessible if our site goes offline.

Other news:

Facebook: We have a new Hebrew language Facebook page, updated daily and picking up followers fairly quickly.  We’re up to 48 likes.  We also have pages in Turkish (99 likes), French (300 likes) and English (6,441 likes).  We only have 209 people on our Hebrew language mailing list, so this is quite good — 1 in 4 are now Facebook fans.  If we had the same result in English, we’d have something like 19,000 fans on Facebook.

New home page: The new home page is now working in 11 languages and should be working in all 29 by the end of this week.  Following a vigorous discussion about the logo, we’ll make a decision in the next few days.

New pages for countries and state/provinces: This is also being configured according to the new design, and hugely improved.  See for example the new UK home page at http://www.labourstart.org.uk.

Campaigns: The Hong Kong dock workers remains our latest, with over 7,300 messages sent so far, though we will likely be launching a new one today for the ITF.  We’ve added a prominent link on campaigns to Reddit which, according to participants in the recent e-Campaigning Forum, can be a very effective way to boost traffic to a site (at no cost).  Two of our oldest campaigns — Nissan USA and the Philippines — have been closed.  A new version of a Canada-only campaign has also been launched, with over 600 messages this week.

Mailing lists: We now have a mailing list in Thai with 49 subscribers, and our first campaign in that language.

Book: We’re nearly done with the writing of our introduction to the global labour movement — we hope to go to press this Friday and have copies ready for sale by 4th May, when we hold the LabourStart May Day party in London.

May Day party:  This important fund-raising event takes place on 4th May this year at the Bread & Roses pub in London.  I’m hoping to raise up to £1,000 pounds.  So far, over 200 people have either confirmed their attendance or said they may come (slightly more say they will definitely come).  The general secretary of the ITF is due to speak, as are others.  Two performers have volunteered to provide the entertainment for the evening — Dave Thorpe and The Ruby Kid.

Today in Labour History: Edd’s added many more items, as we need to ensure that we have at least one for each month for each of the major countries.  This appears on the bottom of our UK page, if you want to see what it looks like.  Comrades who can help should contact us [email protected]

Dormant languages: We’ve identified 11 languages where correspondents have ceased posting news — we’ll need to chase them up and find replacements, but if comrades have any suggestions they’d be most welcome.  The languages are:

Campaigns: We launched two new campaigns this week, both focussing on Asia. One is in defense of labour rights activist Andy Hall, threatened with jail and a multi-million dollar fine in Thailand. The other is in support of Hong Kong’s dockworkers, on strike for more than a week. We added a graphical link to Reddit which you can see on the Hong Kong campaign — we’ll be working to make this more useful in the next few days.

Helping our friends: We devoted one of our mass mailings in English last week to promoting — for a second time — the IUF’s current campaign targetting Mondelez (Kraft) for its violations of workers rights in Tunisia and Egypt. As a result of that extra push, we helped this turn into the largest online campaign the IUF has ever run. We also gave a special push to Radio Labour last week, timing the launch of the Andy Hall campaign to coincide with an interview they did with him. The result was a record 4,000 listeners to the interview. We also helped three GUFs (ITF, UNI and IndustriALL) as well as our correspondents by sharing with them (the correspondents) details of three new jobs at the GUFs in campaigns and communications.

Our home page: The photo of day/week is no longer a fixed height, as Derek requested. And I’ve publicized the 9 logos Masha prepared for us to correspondents by email, getting a lot of comments. We’ll make a decision soon.

Our second book: A first draft is now ready and we hope to have the book in hand in time for our May Day party in London.

Internationalization: We now have a mailing list in Thai (46 names) and will soon begin mailing to it. We have the beginnings of a LabourStart Facebook page in Hebrew as well.

Fundraising: We did a mailing last Wednesday to 12,867 “power campaigners” — people who have supported at least 5 of our campaigns in the last year. We asked each person to donate $50 to LabourStart and I set myself the fairly randomly-chosen goal of hoping that we’d get 1% of that list to give an average of $50 each — for a total of £4,271. We reached over 95% of that target by this morning, less than five days after the fundraising campaign began. We are also continuing to build for the LabourStart May Day party/fundraiser in London on May 4th. 162 people have said they are either coming (80) or thinking of coming (82).

Publicity: We had a very complimentary article appear in the German newspaper Woz (see details below).

Survey: We sent out a summary of the results of our annual survey of trade union use of the net to all our readers.

Mailing list migration: We’ve nearly completed the migration of our mailing lists from MailChimp to Sendy. Still working on the issue of templates, and for the moment, French and English lists remain on MailChimp, costing us a small fortune every month.

Absence: I will be travelling all of next week, back at work on 1st April. Edd will cover for me in the office.

Campaigns launched: We launched a new UK-only campaign for the RMT — our third currently-active campaign for them.

Campaigns to come: In April we anticipate at least two new campaigns — DISK in Turkey wants our help dealing with a German employer who is trying to impose a yellow union on its employees. And UNI and BWI in Asia want us to campaign on behalf of an anti-trafficking campaigner (and LabourStart correspondent) who is being taken to court by a company in Thailand.

Campaigns closed: We closed two campaigns in the last two weeks — Netherlands (FNV) and El Salvador. No clear result in either case.

Campaign improvements: There will be a number of improvements in light of things I learned recently. In all upcoming campaigns, we’ll try to include a Radio Labour component; Marc Belanger has kindly offered to interview key people and we’ll integrate this into the campaigns. I’ve fixed how the campaigns will show when we link to them on Facebook — it will no longer show by default the LabourStart logo, and instead will allow us to choose a better photo from the campaign page itself. Finally, when we’d look at closed campaigns, the number of supporters shown was always wrong. This has now been fixed.

Mass mailings: We did our first A/B testing — see below. Interesting results.

New website design: Launched around 11 days ago. We are now working on getting many of the internal pages to conform to the new design. Masha has suggested a number of new logos. Derek pointed out two problems — top stories with long titles were over-writing the text below, and some stories were being orphaned over the three columns at the bottom; both now fixed. We learned that top news stories in other languages were appearing on the English home page; this too is now fixed.

Internationalization: We now have campaigns and mailings in Slovak. We have a home page displaying news in Korean (we’ve had Korean campaigns for some time). And our new home page design has been implemented in Esperanto — the first language other than English to use this.

The Global Labour Movement: An Introduction. Our second book — due for launch in early May. In addition to the bits that Edd is writing, we’ll have contributions from the British TUC, Amnesty International, ICTUR, the Global Labour Institutes, and Dan Gallin. And we have activists on the ground answering email interview questions about their relationship with the GUFs. Should be interesting and useful, and we hope to launch it on 4th May. Which brings us to …

LabourStart’s First-Ever May Day Party: Due to be held at London’s only union-owned pub, the Bread & Roses, on 4th May. We’re building interest in this and intend to push it very hard throughout April.

Public speeches: I spoke last week in Oxford at the annual e-Campaigning Forum, on a panel with Anita Gardner of IndustriALL and again on the closing panel. Next Sunday, I’ve been invited to speak at a fringe meeting at the annual conference of Britain’s largest teachers’ union, the NASUWT, on the subject of jailed teacher trade unionists.

Third Annual Survey of Trade Union Use of the Net: Closed today. Expect a report shortly.

Click on the image to enlarge:

I was forced to launch the new version of our home page in English prematurely due to a human error (my error), but in the end that’s good.  There are a number of things that weren’t ready just yet, so I’ll be updating this blog with details of the changes I’ve made today and in the next few days in line with things I know we need to fix, and suggestions that are coming in.  Please keep those suggestions coming!

Here are some of the fixes done today:

1. A link has been added at the bottom of the page to the old home page — this is primarily to allow us to identify things which are there, but aren’t yet on the new page.
2. I’ve restored a link to our Working Women page.
3. And to our Newswires page.
4. I restored the ‘view more news from your country or region’ box to the bottom list of current news stories.
5. I restored the ‘submit news’ link.
6. And finally, I restored the link to our privacy page.

There’s a lot more to do (including making this work for all languages), so consider this a process and please be patient.

Annual survey: We’ve gone up from 500 responses to 2,082. We still need 872 more to beat last year’s record. We got an article on the TUC blog, Stronger Unions, which has helped boost interest in the UK.  We’ll stop collecting responses in just 13 more days — on 19 March.

Site re-design: I incorporated most of the comments made by comrades on what I did so far. Masha, who is a professional graphic designer, is going to suggest a new logo design soon — once we have that, we can go live, first with the English version. The draft site is here.

Campaigns: We launched our Turkey campaign and it’s already up to 8,613 supporters. We closed down the Bahrain and Netherlands FNV campaigns (see separate posts for reports.) Edd and I both did articles about the Turkey campaign for Solidarity and the New Left Project (a website).

Book 1 (Online campaigning): The French edition has been created and is available for purchase. Sales of both editions have now reached 611, with another 43 free copies given out, for a total of 654. We’ve now paid for ‘extended distribution’ meaning that the books (in English and French) will be available in bookshops and from other online retailers, including Amazon Canada.

Book 2 (Global labour movement): Edd and I are working hard on this one, aiming to get it ready by May Day. In addition to what we’re writing, we solicited submissions from a number of comrades and are pleased that we’ll have contributions from ICTUR, Amnesty, the Global Labour Institutes, the TUC and others. See more details here: http://www.labourstart.org/blogs/?p=2818

Internationalization: We’ll have campaigns in Slovak starting this week. All our campaigns have been translated into Esperanto and our translation group in that language now has 8 members. I’ve contributed an article (an interview, of sorts) for an Austrian Esperanto magazine about LabourStart. We’ll have a Korean interface for our news later today.

Fundraising: We now have a venue and date for our London May Day fundraiser – May 4th, 19:30 at the Bread and Roses pub.  Two months before the event, 77 people say they are coming or may be coming.

Public speeches: I spoke at the Unison Wales Women’s Development Weekend in Swansea on Saturday to an audience of about 26; I sold all 10 of the online campaigning books I brought with me. Next Wednesday, Edd and I (and Anita Gardner of IndustriALL) will be on a panel at the e-Campaigning Forum in Oxford. On March 31st, I’ve been invited to speak at a fringe meeting of the annual conference in Bournemouth of the teachers union NASUWT. In addition, Napo – the probation officers union – has asked me to run a workshop on social media.

Social Networks: We now have a page on Google+ which, according to our survey, is widely used by trade unionists.

App for smartphones and tablets: I’m completing one this week for the IUF and when done, I’ll know how to do the one for LabourStart.