Inside LabourStart

… let’s promote this.

We’ve just closed down the campaign in support of jailed teacher trade unionist Rosalba Gaviria Toro, which generated 3,590 messages of protest.  Natasha Morgan of Justice for Colombia wrote to say: “Labour Start has really boosted the campaign, and it would be excellent to work with you again in the future.”

We’ve found a better way than Twitfeed to automatically update LabourStart’s tweets.  We now use Tweetlive for this purpose.  At present we have 3,027 followers, a gain of 25% in the last six months with some 600 new followers.

We now have a newswire for British Columbia; this was requested by someone who designs and manages websites for unions there.

All the email addresses we collected in our first annual survey of global trade union use of the net have now been added to our mailing lists.

Here are our top current campaigns – all of them launched within the last month – in order of popularity:

• 4,617 Bangladesh: Free Moshrefa Mishu (20 Jan)
• 3,346  Mexico: Defend trade union rights (10 Feb)
• 2,554 Turkey: Reform labour laws now (26 Jan)
• 2,385 Philippines: Dole must respect union rights (16 Feb)
• 2,332 Pakistan: Reinstate sacked trade union leader at Syngenta (9 Feb)
• 1,683 Turkey: Polyplex must reinstate sacked workers, negotiate with union (9 Feb)

• I had  a meeting yesterday with Shane Enright, the trade union coordinator for Amnesty International UK.  We discussed among other things Turkey and Mexico and ways we can continue to work together – including Amnesty’s involvement in the next LabourStart conference.
• Our survey now has 1,300 responses – a big gain over the last week.  I will close it down on Monday and report the results.
• I managed to dilute the size of LabourStart’s news links database.  We are supposed to be restricted to 100 MB of data, though our internet service provider has not made an issue of us going slightly above that.  Nevertheless, I now have a system in place to check once a month and to keep the size of the database under control.
• I’ve created a new newswire – soon to be publicized – in French covering the countries of the Maghreb. In the course of doing so, I found that all our regional newswires are still referencing our old database and need to be fixed.  I will do this next week.
• LabourStart was temporarily offline – even emails to labourstart.org weren’t working – very briefly last week.  Our internet service provider spotted the problem and solved it even before we complained.
• Our new campaigns are picking up support – the Turkey campaign has 1,388 supporters after one day; the Bangladesh campaign has 4,356 supporters after 8 days.

• I plan to stop allowing participation in our online survey once we have 1,000 responses.  We currently have 978.  Please help by spreading the word.  By the way, the largest groups of survey participants come from the following countries so far: UK, USA, Canada, Australia and Norway.
• UnionBook has now reached over 3,000 members following the push yesterday.  In fact, we’ve picked up 120 new members in the last 9 days.
• We’ll be closing the Vietnam campaign in the next few days.  This will bring us down to only two active campaigns.
• We’ve had a formal request for a campaign from Bangladesh.
• We are expecting additional requests for campaigns in the next few days from Turkey, Japan and Korea.
• I’ll be setting up a French language newswire for the Maghreb countries, as Andy has long proposed.
• I’ve read the Berkman Center (Harvard) report on denial of service attacks on independent media and human rights websites and plan to implement some of their suggestions for improved security in the next few days.  I’ve also written up a short article for the British weekly Solidarity about this.
• I’ve changed the way we backup the site now.  There is now a full weekly backup of our MySQL databases (we didn’t do this before) and instead of packing (zipping) all our other files and backing that up, we’re now backing up all the files on the site on a weekly basis using FTP.
• I have written once again to the domain registrar for the “.tv” domain requesting that they reinstate our labourstart.tv domain.

• Last week we published our first news story in Tamil.
• We’ve been in touch with our comrades in Tbilisi and have been assured that our Georgian language edition will go live next week.
• We’re expecting the translation into Hindi to be ready in the next few days.
• Our front page in Turkish now includes graphical links to all the country’s national trade union centers as well as two pro-labour NGOs we’ve been working with – and they’ve all been informed of this.  One of the centers (DISK) has discussed ways to cooperate with us.  Meanwhile, a very large number of Turkish trade unionists have signed up to use UnionBook.
• The ITF has called for a global day of action in support of Turkey’s TUMTIS union which is locked in dispute with UPS – we may need to launch a big online campaign in another week or two.
• We have a new newswire – USA labour news stories in Spanish.
• We stopped submissions to our Labour Photo of the Year competition and the judges are currently preparing a shortlist.
• I’ve begun work in earnest on our iPhone/iPad app.
• We’ve asked correspondents to help our comrades in Egypt (at CTUWS) who are looking for books to translate into Arabic – they’ve begun with one that was a LabourStart book of the week.

Some of the things I’ve been working on today —

• Have taken further steps to transfer the domain laborlists.org over to our web server at 1&1 Internet.  As you may recall, we were using this domain name on a US-based server to do our mailings until they decided that we were mailing out too much and we needed to migrate everything over to labourlists.org on 1&1.
• I recorded my weekly podcast on labour and technology, focussing on LabourStart and globalization.  It will go live tomorrow.
• I checked if our search function works on keywords and it does — at least in English. If you search on the term ‘FBU’ you’ll see a news story I posted today that has the term in the keywords field, but not in the title or source of the story.  It was reported to us at our conference that this may not work in some other languages, so we’re doing further checks.
• I looked into our RSS news wire in Russian, which has issues with character encoding.  Trying to fix this now.
• And as usual, I added a number of new subscribers to our mailing lists (people who have supported our campaigns), signed up some new correspondents, answered correspondence, and posted a dozen news stories on the site.

At the LabourStart correspondents meeting last Sunday in Hamilton, someone suggested we look into BuddyPress as an alternative to Elgg.  It looks interesting, but I’m not convinced we have good reason to migrate (even if we can migrate).  So I’ve put it out there via UnionBook, Facebook, Twitter, etc and will see if someone thinks this is a great idea and can make a compelling case for it.

I closed down the Iraq oil workers campaign in all languages – it had been running for more than 3 months.

I’ve setup the Serbian edition of LabourStart, and am currently working with a comrade there to get it off the ground.

Last Friday I recorded my sixth podcast, this time on the subject of hashtags and how they were used at the LabourStart conference.  As of this afternoon, 376 people have downloaded it and listened to it.  I also wrote up an account of the conference and posted it to my blog.  Then I updated the conference page to include links to my article and the podcast relating to it.

I sent out mass mailing promoting our book of the month, my podcast, two articles about the conference and our ActNOW newswire.  As a result of this, we sold a few books and got a couple more sites to adopt our newwire.

I’ve created new newswires for India and Pakistan at the request of the IUF’s Asia Pacific region.  You can see them here.

1&1 Internet finally fixed the problem – no explanation, and four days overdue.  The result is that newswires are updated every 15 minutes, and the numbers of supporters showing on campaign pages are now accurate.  I was doing this manually throughout the day for the last few days, as it was important to keep the new local newswires up to date and to show the rapid growth of the Vale campaign.

The first few websites to adopt our local state/province newswires are now live — and I think this looks great.  For example, in the greater Washington, D.C. area Capital Air Lodge 1759 (a part of the International Association of Machinists – IAM) is running our DC newswire on their website. In Toronto, ACTRA, which represents over 15,000 acting, stunt and background professionals, is using our Ontario newswire on their site.  We’ve also had expressions of interest from unions in Illinois, Massachusetts, Kansas and England.  We need to keep promoting this — I think eventually we can have a very large number of local unions using very local newswires.