Inside LabourStart

The Wire, an interesting feature on UnionBook that allows us to also post to Twitter, has stopped working.  This has something to do with the upgrade to version 1.7 of Elgg, the social networking software which underpins our site.  I’ve tried many different approaches to solving this, and posted appeals for help and support to the Elgg community without much luck so far.  I have now asked an Elgg programmer who we’ve worked with before to help us sort this out (for pay).

We also need to sort out registration for new users, now being done manually to prevent spam attacks.  I’ve asked the same programmer to help us out with that.  It would be good to have this sorted before next Monday, as we expect to register new users at the SIGTUR congress in Brazil.

We were also asked by one of our users to restore a Google translate button to UnionBook — but the Google website has gone a little weird about this, and I actually couldn’t find the code.  Instead, I’ve  put a link to the Yahoo translator which can translate our pages to Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.  I know this is no substitute for a proper translation, but it should give some readers of those languages the gist of what UnionBook is all about.

I’ve been investing considerably more time in UnionBook lately — in part because there is growing interest in using it.

Today I added a number of language plugins and UnionBook is now available in Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Croatian, Serbian, Finnish, and Italian, as well as the original languages of English, French, Dutch, German, Spanish and Polish.

We have been asked to create versions in Portuguese, Indonesian and Korean and I think we’ll need to put out a general appeal for help with translating Elgg modules, which is what we rely upon to get this done.

I upgraded UnionBook successfully to the very latest version (1.7) which is a good thing, but it has resulted in a couple of bugs.  The first one was fixed quickly with the support of the Elgg community.  The second one is currently being dealt with — here’s what I posted to the front page of UnionBook:

We’ve just upgraded UnionBook from Elgg 1.5 to 1.7; expect some bugs and please let us know when something which previously worked no longer does. And yes, we already know about the “Form is missing __token or __ts fields” error message and hope to have that one sorted soon. Thanks for your patience.

The last month saw a very big gain for our mailing lists and much smaller growth for all the others.  Here are the totals with the changes since the end of February in brackets:

• Mailing lists – subscribers: 65,379 [+2,243]
• LabourStart’s English language mailing list – 54,236 [+1,582]
• UnionBook – members: 4,435 [+25]
• Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 2,863 [+54]
• Twitter – followers: 2,079 [+57]
• Correspondents: 756 [+9]
• Union group on Flickr: 533 [+5]
• LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 158 [+7]

Some highlights from the mailing lists — the other large groups are:

• Norwegian 2,589
• French 1,772
• Spanish 1,020
• German 738
• Italian 452
• Russian 293
• Polish 289
• Swedish 221
• Portuguese 216
• Dutch 186
• Danish 149

I haven’t been updating this blog often enough — but LabourStart has been keeping us very busy these days …

Labour Video of the Year competition – voting began yesterday.  Over 800 votes cast in the first 24 hours.  Click here to watch the voting as it happens.

Global campaigns – We launched a campaign in support of Mexican miners last week.  3,112 supporters so far and the campaign is available in 7 languages.  Our campaign in support of imprisoned Turkish trade unionist Seher Tümer also has over 3,000 messages sent — in 7 languages as well.  The campaign we launched in support of hunger striking Irish workers ended with an agreement and was closed down within 6 days of launch. We will shortly be launching a campaign in support of workers in Guyana, at the request of the ICEM.

National campaigns – We have been asked both by the British TUC and the New Zealand union PSA to launch campaigns targetting only people in those countries.  The TUC campaign has been very slow to take off, but the New Zealand one has brought in well over 400 responses — adding many New Zealand trade unionists to our list. In addition, we did our first mailing to our thousands of Australian subscribers in support of a campaign there.

Travels – I continue to be invited to speak at union events around the world.  My upcoming travel schedule includes visits to Egypt, Turkey, Canada and Brazil — all within the next two months.  The last of these (not yet confirmed) is to speak at the SIGTUR congress for trade unionists from throughout the global south.  They are particularly keen on UnionBook.

Here are today’s totals with the change since the end of December in brackets.  The total for mailing lists now includes all users of laborlists.org — and this now includes a small number who are not subscribers to LabourStart’s own lists.  There is no longer any redundancy — someone who is on both the English list and another list is no longer counted twice.  So the figure of 62,225 is much closer to an accurate number than we’ve had for some time now.  To make it easier to track progress on our largest list, I’m now including the total for the English LabourStart list as well.

• Mailing lists – subscribers: 62,225 [+1,690]
• LabourStart’s English language mailing list – 52,548
• UnionBook – members: 4,366 [+38]
• Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 2,764 [+160]
• Twitter – followers: 1,987 [+47]
• Correspondents: 732 [+10]
• Union group on Flickr: 527 [+1]
• LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 137 [+58]

Here are today’s totals with the change since the end of November in brackets.

UnionBook has not actually lost members; what’s happened is that I’ve deleted hundreds of banned members.  The current number is almost entirely real trade unionists using the site.  Our mailing lists have hardly grown at all, due both to the holiday season and the lack of new, inspiring campaigns.  The Facebook group continues to grow fairly dramatically, as does the number of followers on Twitter.  Our new LinkedIn group has quintupled in size over the last month, though I can’t say we’ve yet found a real use for it.

• Mailing lists – subscribers: 60,535 [+217]
• UnionBook – members: 4,328 [-608]
• Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 2,604 [+90]
• Twitter – followers: 1,940 [+70]
• Correspondents: 722 [+8]
• Union group on Flickr: 526 [+4]
• LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 79 [+65]

One of my goals in 2010 is to save LabourStart a considerable amount of money by reducing the number of servers we currently run and web services we pay for.  In addition to the LabourStart site on 1&1 Internet, we have a server on Memset (for UnionBook – £3,367/year), one on 1&1 Internet (for an abortive attempt to set up PHPlist but also currently running a number of IUF mailing lists – £207/year), and we pay a monthly fee of £60 to UnionLists.org.uk for our mailing lists (£720/year).

I want try to shut down the last two of these and have taken the advice of the person who does the IUF’s Asian Food Worker site and have purchased a very low cost server in the US (£120/year).  My intention is to set up PHPlist there and run all the LabourStart lists and possibly the IUF lists as well.  I have already registered the domain name laborlists.org for this server.  The cost saving will be £807 per year.

We’ll obviously also be looking at ways to reduce UnionBook costs, or to get a union (or unions) to pay for this.

One of the problems people have pointed out is that when we announce a group on UnionBook (e.g., the support group for Vale Inco), if you’re not logged in or don’t have an account, there’s no link to join the group and no explanation that you need to be a logged in user to join groups.  (Facebook, of course, does this.)

I’ve just written to the people that sorted out our spam problem to ask them to cost fixing this — because when we launch campaigns, it would be good to launch UnionBook groups at the same time — a way to get people to login and newcomers to sign up for the first time.

We now have 4,306 users on UnionBook who have not been banned — this is more or less the number of actual users at the moment.  Most of them are not active.  I have begun to send weekly mailings to all of them to try to get them more active.