Inside LabourStart

Public appearances in the UK: We’ll be represented at three upcoming UK-based events.  On 19.1, I’ll be speaking at the Southend Labour Party. On 24.1, Edd will speak at the Unions 21 tech seminar. And on 13-14 March, we’re organizing a panel at the E-Campaigning Forum in Oxford.

Campaigns: We’re about to launch two new ones today – on El Salvador and the Philippines.  These are our first new campaigns in nearly 6 weeks — it has been a very quiet season.  As reported below, we now have the campaigns newswire working correctly in 19 languages, in both JavaScript and RSS versions – please make sure to promote this in your country.

Book: Sales have reached 377.  Let’s all push hard to get that number up to 500 over the next few days.  We were briefly an Amazon.co.uk best-seller, hitting the top 1,000 books they were selling, and reaching number 2 in our category.  A Kindle edition is coming soon, and we’re starting to think about doing another book.  Meanwhile, I expect to complete my book for UCS by the end of January – the working title is  Making Unions Stronger – Using The Internet Better.

Labour Newswire: We’ve pushed our newswires aggressively to UK unions, and it’s bearing fruit.  We had 40 UK sites listed, that dropped down to 20 after Edd removed all the dead wood, and now we’re back up to 28. You can see the up-to-date list of all 302 sites using our newswire here.

Today in Labour History: We now have 11 people adding content to this; almost every day, there is something on our front page in English.   (And more things coming soon.)

Inactive correspondents: Edd has gone through the 500 or so correspondents who’ve not been active, writing individually to each one, and giving support (such as new passwords) where needed.  In a few weeks, we’ll be deleting those who are showing no interest in continuing.

Upcoming global solidarity conferences: I’ve finally heard (today) from a colleague in Germany about the possibility of a conference in Berlin in May 2014; I’ll be following up.  Derek has been in discussions with people in Vancouver about a conference there in late 2014.

Fund-raising: We’ve gotten generous donations from two unions in the USA (United Steelworkers and the Amalgamated Transportation Union) and hoping for more.  We’ve sent out a few copies of the campaigns book to donors who have given £1,000 or more in the last couple of years.