LabourStart’s Global Solidarity Conference in Toronto in May was still going on when we began discussions about where and when to hold the next one. We have nothing firm to report just yet, but a heads up to all of you: we are hoping to hold it around November 2017 in Hong Kong. More details when we have them.
Here are the number of supporters for each of our current campaigns, broken down by language:
(You may want to right-click on that image above and open it in a new tab to make it more legible.)
As you can see, we currently have 7 campaigns running, all of them launched during the last 3 months. Only one of them, the Uzbekistan campaign, has gotten over 10,000 messages sent. The second most successful campaign — and trailing far behind — is the Peru campaign, which over 7,500 messages sent. All of the others lag significantly behind.
Some of this will be fixed as I complete some of the translations and mailings to our Spanish and German lists, which are quite large. But we can expect a drop-off as we enter the summer months in the northern hemisphere.
We need to do some creative thinking about how we ramp up all our campaigns to be 10,000 supporters at least, and how we break our record, set nearly three years with this campaign, of almost 22,000 messages sent.
LabourStart has always been designed to work on every device — desktop and laptop PCs, tablets, smartphones. But we recently started receiving reports from some BlackBerry users that they were no longer able to access our campaigns on their phones.
This turned out to be due to our SSL certificate being rejected — that’s the certificate that allows us to use the https:// prefix for our campaigns, which makes the transmission of user information more secure. Our friends at WebArchitects rushed to our rescue, changing the way our certificate is done. And the result is that once again, everyone can support our campaigns — even BlackBerry users!
P.S. If you ever want to test our SSL security for the campaigns website, you can do so here. But be aware — it takes a few minutes for the test to complete. We’re currently rated A+, which is pretty good, I imagine.
Recently our web hosting company (1&1 Internet) announced that it was upgrading our site to newer software and some things — not clear which things — may stop working.
And, as predicted, some things did. Among these were:
More things may be broken as well — we’re learning about these one at a time.
All of the above were quickly fixed yesterday, but if you come across something that doesn’t work any more (on our news site, not our campaigns) — and that throws up a generic error page — please let us know by email. Thanks!
We continue to experiment with ways to make LabourStart available on mobile devices.
Our latest effort is the beginnings of a LabourStart “magazine” on Flipboard.
If you use Flipboard on your phone, please email me and I’ll get back to you with more details.
Thanks.
Derek Blackadder here. A minor celebration (I’m having caffeinated coffee for a change!) this morning as the English-language Canadian Twitter feed just passed the 5,000 followers mark.
It tweets automatically (I load Hootsuite each morning with stories from the Canada English-language page) once an hour starting at 0700 Eastern and continuing until 1900 Eastern 7 days a week.
Our French-language feed lags a bit numbers-wise at 887 so we’ll be putting on a bit of a push over the next while to get that past the 1,000 followers mark. It tweets once every 2 hours starting at 0800 and ending at 1800.
From what I have read the frequency of tweets is a significant (but not the only) factor in the followers that a feed picks up and so I’m trying to figure out if the French-language feed can move to once an hour as well.
Derek Blackadder here.
I spoke in Vancouver at a fringe event at the convention of the Confederation of Canadian Unions, the smallest of the 4 central labour bodies here. About 160 present. I had about an hour, including time for questions, on the theme of ‘LabourStart Behind the Scenes: what we do, how we do it and how we can help’. (more…)
by Derek Blackadder
The following is a section of my regular column (Webwork) in the Canadian labour magazine Our Times. Eric thought it might be of interest and so…
ON HIS WAY TO THE EDUCATION International World Congress in Ottawa in July, Iranian teachers’ union leader Esmail Abdi was arrested by the Iranian police; detained without charge; likely tortured; and almost certainly thinking about the fate of his predecessor, Farzad Kamangar, who was executed after a trial lasting seven minutes. (more…)
Gisela writes:
On the eve of the Greek elections, which brought a huge victory for the decidedly left-wing Syriza and will – hopefully – challenge and change the austerity discussion in Europe a good deal, 285 German individuals and organisations published an open letter to the Greek public in a Greek newspaper, EFSYN. In the letter, they spoke out in defense of the freedom of the Greek people to decide themselves on their government, and against the interference particularly by German politicians and media in the pre-election debate. It condemns the threats and bullying, and expresses solidarity with the social forces that want to change the political and economic course in Greece, pointing out that their victory could change whole political debate in Europe.
The LabourStart Berlin offline group, founded after last May’s LS conference in Berlin, decided unanimously that we’d support the initiative. Our signature appeared, together with the others, on two different days in the week before the election and was seen by tens of thousands of readers. We don’t claim, of course, we’ve won the elections – that was the Greeks choice, in the end! – but we hope to have contributed a little bit to balance out the power play of the European neoliberal camp, and to building transnational worker solidarity against neoliberal austerity policies and the onslaught on social and political rights in Europe.
I’ve decided to post weekly reports on what’s going on at LabourStart — please feel free to share these with colleagues and friends. 2015 is going to be one our busiest years ever — and here’s the first week …
Retreat – Tunis: We’re moving on this; I’ve sent the necessary letters regarding hotels and meeting space to our friends in the UGTT in Tunisia. More on this next week.
Apps:
We’re using two different app-building platforms each of which has drawbacks. Como builds both for Android and iOS, but it handles RSS feeds badly (it takes two clicks, not one, to show a news story.) I’ve written to them to get help on this.
Meanwhile, Andromo which is better (and has improved at my suggestion how they cache RSS feeds, because at the moment they show our closed campaigns) unfortunately only works in Android. This is what is holding up the release of our iOS app (approved by the Apple store, but I’m not satisfied with how it works) and our apps in other languages.
Meanwhile, our Android app has been published in the Amazon store, so users of Amazon’s devices (Kindle, Firephone, etc) can use it; also, users of Blackberries can get their version of the app there.
Publications: We’ll probably begin work on the 2016 Global Labour Calendar this coming week. Anyone who’s willing to help is invited to post comments below. We’re also working on two books we’re committed to getting out this year — one on migrant workers, and one with papers and speeches from our Berlin conference last May (long delayed, I know). (Thanks to Derek for helping on this.)
Survey of trade union use the net: I’ve suggested we consider doing this again; so far, three people have volunteered to help, so next week we’ll probably start work on this again. (Thanks to Derek, David and Gerhard.)
Italian LabourStart: We now have a Twitter feed and and an email address, and a group of committed correspondents and translators. The Italian mailing list is our fourth-largest with over 4,000 addresses, and we’re keen to grow it and to be more useful to the Italian unions. (Thanks Silvana and Andrea.)
Guidelines for new correspondents: This has now been translated into Spanish. (Thanks David).
Survey of LabourStart correspondents: I’ll make the results available in a few days, but one result is clear: most people do want a discussion forum. I’ve looked into a couple of the better known options, but will be asking for volunteers to help with this project. (Thanks to Gisela for doing the survey.)
Online campaigns course: I’ve begun planning for a meeting in Brussels later this month with the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) which has agreed to hold a 3-day course in Germany for European trade unionists.
Brazil project: As you may know, we have received a grant to do some work building LabourStart in Brazil. I’ve started writing to our contacts there.
LabourStart in Numbers: I’ve done the last monthly report; from now on, this will be done every quarter.
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