Inside LabourStart

You can now add YouTube videos to your UnionBook pages – simply select My Videos from the menu on top.  I’ve just added the ITUC’s child hammer video on mine.  When you do this, it automatically posts an announcement to the front page of UnionBook.

The good news is that I’m now devoting myself to beginning to fix as many of the genuine problems we’re having as I can.  The bad news is that the programmer we were employing to do this for us has no time to do it.  So it’s back to learning how to deal with Elgg.  Yes, it would be great if some volunteers with PHP experience would step forward to help, but that hasn’t happened so far and is unlikely to be the case, but I might ask in a future mailing to UnionBook users.  I’ll update you here meanwhile as I cross things off the todo list.

Done:

1. You can now search for groups – I explain how in a blog posting and in the Help page.  I will probably also point this out in our next mailing to UnionBook users.
2. I’ve written a script that allows an owner of a group (actually, at the moment, anyone) to email all members of a group.  Still working on the security, but in principle we now have a very powerful tool.  I’ve just sent out the first test mailing now.

Over 90% of the users on UnionBook have not chosen a language preference – something we might want to work on by forcing them to choose, or at the very least encouraging them.  At the moment, 217 have chosen English, 8 French, 5 Spanish, 2 German, 1 Dutch and maybe some others.  I’ve written a script to show the breakdown.

Campaigns:

• We’ve asked to close down the Russian campaign after 4 months and 2,415 supporters.
• We are about to launch a new campaign in support of Turkish workers.  Both campaigns came from the International Metalworkers Federation.
• Campaign counter now works on all languages.

News:

• Work has begun on localizing the entry of news links – we’re testing this on French first.  The aim is to have all the input screens work in the local language so we can recruit correspondents who don’t know any English at all.

Book sales:

• We’ve sold 53 copies of the Global Unions, Global Business book, which is not bad.
• The Union Books group has 71 members, making it one of the largest groups on UnionBook.
• We’ve sold $986.55 worth of books at UCS in the first week of April.
• We’re in negotiations with the bookstore of one of the largest unions in Europe, Ver.di, in Berlin and might be able to begin selling German-language union books to German trade union members.
• We’re also talking to an Australian university press about helping to sell one of its titles.

Newswires:

• Did some more work on creating a Unicode version of these for sites which have switched over to Unicode. So far, French and German are working.

Fundraising:

• There will be concert in Sheffield on 2 May the proceeds of which will be donated to LabourStart – more details soon.
• We’re also finishing up the deal with No Sweat Apparel to produce a union-made UnionBook t-shirt.
• We’re following up with possible donations to LabourStart from Unite (UK) and CUPE (Canada).

• We now have over 59,000 addresses on our mailing lists.
• We’ve sold 29 copies of the Global Unions book — I was hoping to sell more (ideally, 100).
• UnionBook is 11 members short of the 2,500 member mark.
• We’ve helped the CAW in Canada by promoting one of their campaigns – but not as a LabourStart campaign.

A few things from the last couple of weeks that I haven’t updated yet here …

• LabourStartJobs.org will finally close down this summer.  We needed to give 6 months notice.  Once this is closed, we can consider launching a free jobs board for trade unionists – this is something we might want to discuss this summer.
• UnionBook now has over 2,500 users though not all have confirmed.  We continue to send out weekly mailings to all of them.  In the last 7 days, we’ve picked up another 122 users.  We have a list of things we want done to the site and have hired someone to do these things.
• The ActNOW wire in French has been fixed – this is part of a whole bunch of problems we’ve had after we converted LabourStart to Unicode without waiting for the rest of the trade union movement to join us – meaning that we’ve had to re-convert some of our content back to earlier formats to display properly on union websites.
• We’ve submitted a proposal to Unite, the largest union in the UK, asking for support.
• The link to show more news for individual countries now works properly in all languages.
• Having written our first script that can read the UnionBook database – it shows the size of the various groups – we can now do much more.  We can create our own tools to monitor and administer the system.
• We’ve submitted a draft early day motion to the British House of Commons regarding UnionBook – this will probably be introduced in the next few days.
• The Labour News Network in its most recent incarnation (Jottit) has now been closed down.  UnionBook replaces it.
• We’ll shortly begin selling this book – waiting for final confirmation from the publisher.
• We’re exploring moving our campaigns from the existing 1&1 server – which could not handle the most recent flood of participants – to our new dedicated server which we use for UnionBook.  This should solve the problem.
• NoSweat Apparel in the US has offered to produce UnionBook t-shirts which we will shortly begin selling.
• There’s probably more, but I can’t remember it all.

We have over 1,900 people who’ve set up accounts.  Several hundred of them have not completed the process and I’m coping with a large number of emails about that.  We have a tool to manually validate, but I want to use it only when we’re sure that this is a genuine user.

We’ve not gotten access to our new MySQL database and I was able to easily download the user file, meaning that I now have access to all 1,900+ email addresses.

Rather than relying on Elgg’s own mass mailing facility (which crashed our server last time I tried it), I’ve imported these email addresses into a new list I’ve set up at unionlists.org.uk, which we use for all the other LabourStart lists.  Once this is approved by the listmaster (Nick Holden), we can do regular weekly mailings to UnionBook subscribers.  These mailings would aim to engage with readers, to help them use the site and deal with their most common problems, to let them know when there are new features and to encourage them to draw others in.

See here.

The upgrade to our new server on Friday has not only not improved the stability of the site, but has made things much worse.

We got some help from Kevin Jardine, who’s an Elgg expert, and much more help from Nick Holden, who knows his way around PHP and MySQL, but so far we’ve not gotten the crashes to stop.  The Elgg group on Google has tried to be helpful, but we haven’t gotten much practical advice from them.

Meanwhile, I’ve been updating the UnionBook group on Facebook which has 150 members.

The technical support team at Memset, our hosts, have tried to be helpful but their most practical bit of advice so far is to move over to ‘managed hosting’ where they “can take a hands on role in troubleshooting any problems with configuration, and also check that software updates have been applied,” as they put it.  I’ve just given them instructions to do this.

I’m flying out of London in another 19 hours and don’t want this hanging over my head while travelling.  Let’s hope this can be resolved today.