Inside LabourStart

A few things from the last couple of weeks that I haven’t updated yet here …

• LabourStartJobs.org will finally close down this summer.  We needed to give 6 months notice.  Once this is closed, we can consider launching a free jobs board for trade unionists – this is something we might want to discuss this summer.
• UnionBook now has over 2,500 users though not all have confirmed.  We continue to send out weekly mailings to all of them.  In the last 7 days, we’ve picked up another 122 users.  We have a list of things we want done to the site and have hired someone to do these things.
• The ActNOW wire in French has been fixed – this is part of a whole bunch of problems we’ve had after we converted LabourStart to Unicode without waiting for the rest of the trade union movement to join us – meaning that we’ve had to re-convert some of our content back to earlier formats to display properly on union websites.
• We’ve submitted a proposal to Unite, the largest union in the UK, asking for support.
• The link to show more news for individual countries now works properly in all languages.
• Having written our first script that can read the UnionBook database – it shows the size of the various groups – we can now do much more.  We can create our own tools to monitor and administer the system.
• We’ve submitted a draft early day motion to the British House of Commons regarding UnionBook – this will probably be introduced in the next few days.
• The Labour News Network in its most recent incarnation (Jottit) has now been closed down.  UnionBook replaces it.
• We’ll shortly begin selling this book – waiting for final confirmation from the publisher.
• We’re exploring moving our campaigns from the existing 1&1 server – which could not handle the most recent flood of participants – to our new dedicated server which we use for UnionBook.  This should solve the problem.
• NoSweat Apparel in the US has offered to produce UnionBook t-shirts which we will shortly begin selling.
• There’s probably more, but I can’t remember it all.

LabourStart’s latest stats are now available.