Nov
19
2010

Friday afternoon updates – in brief

I’ve chased up with correspondents and translators about our new language editions (Tamil, Georgian, Ukrainian, Serbian and Hindi) none of which have gone live yet.  I’ve noted also a ‘Plan B’ in each case where we continue to get no responses from our comrades.  It’s important that all the languages we list have fresh content and we need to identify people who can help consistently with each one.

Next Friday I’m off to Istanbul to speak at a trade union conference on new media – my second visit to Turkey this year as a guest of the unions.

All our recent campaigns have now been published in Turkish thanks to a team effort lead by a new comrade, Deniz.

The front page of Turkish LabourStart now features our campaigns in that language – it used to show only the English ones.

We asked BWI for permission to shut down the Cambodian construction workers’ campaign, which is now 3 months old.  Of course we’ve asked what the result of the campaign has been so that we can report back to our readers.

I’ve begun intensifying our use of Facebook Causes and have now emailed everyone in our largest cause, the one supporting the jailed Vietnamese union activists.

The campaigns software has been fixed – now when you send off a message and see the page asking you to do more, clicking on the link to show all current campaigns takes you directly to your language (instead of to an old page that showed a bunch of flags and languages).

We launched a second Colombian campaign this week at the request of Justice for Colombia, an NGO backed by the British TUC.  JFC has promised to promote the campaign on their website and to their lists.

I wrote a followup email to the comrade who has agreed to coordinate the team of German volunteer translators as none of our recent campaigns or emailings have gone out in that language – even though we have volunteers ready to do so.

I’ve made a number of suggestions to Andrew regarding work towards our conference in Sydney which is only one year away. These include regular phone calls, a closed group on UnionBook, and following up with our correspondents in the region.

We expect to launch a Finnish version of our campaigns starting with the Nokia one (of course) but have not gotten a correctly formatted version of the file we need yet from the metal workers.

I’ve been invited to speak at two union training events in the UK in the near future on the subject of online campaigning and social networks — one is for the UCU (academics union) in Leeds; the other will be a series of events for TSSA.

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