Inside LabourStart

This is a milestone of sorts. 776 have confirmed.  This percentage will rise, as we’ve had 200 new users confirm in the last 11 hours.  We also now have a mechanism to confirm users who could not do so themselves by email.

We upgraded yesterday afternoon to a much more powerful server and are now ready to receive new users.

Previously we had a Celeron 1.0 GHz with 128 MB memory. We now have a Single Quad-Core Xeon X3210 2.13 GHz with 2 GB (maybe 4GB) of memory – so we’ve grown 8 fold (possibly 16 fold).

This will cost us £200 a month to maintain.  We’ll need to start raising money in a month or two to pay for this.

This morning, I wrote to the more than 50,000 people on our English language mailing list to invite them to join.  We had 573 confirmed users of UnionBook when I did that.  We should have over 1,000 sometime today.

OK, we’ll need a more powerful server — I’ve already asked around and we’re going to have to upgrade within the next couple of days.

I announced UnionBook today to all LabourStart correspondents (530+), to members of our group on Facebook (1,887), to supporters of our 3 causes on Facebook – Oak Harbor (2,009), Iran (1,882) and South Korea (3,480), to the Free the Blackadder One group (2,349), to our UnionBook users (523) and with a posting on my blog (http://www.ericlee.info).

Naturally, one minute after I did that, the site froze, I rebooted it, and it crashed.  Kevin Jardine came to the rescue (this is way outside normal working hours) and we’re back online.

Let’s hope the crash was caused by the mass mailing and nothing else and that we can stay afloat until we move to a new server. I’m thinking of upgrading from the lowest end (around £25 a month) to the most powerful Memset has to offer (£350 a month) in the hope that after a month or two, we’ll be able to raise money specifically for this once unions see the benefits.

Barely 6 days into our ‘soft launch’ – we haven’t told our 60,000-strong mailing list yet – and we have 300 confirmed users tonight.  They have created no fewer than 34 groups – with some great ideas among them.

I originally expected we’d get around 10% of the 2,500 people in our LabourStart Facebook group as well as our correspondents to sign up, so 250 would have been good for the first stage.  It’s becoming increasingly clear that we’ll have 500 signed up users even before we go public in January.

In fact, if all goes as I hope, we’ll have ten times as many users as we have now by the end of next month – over 3,000 users and probably a couple of hundred groups.  Wow.

Two hundred nominations for the Labour Website of the Year and one hundred new members of UnionBook following our soft launch.  Good morning, LabourStart.

I’ve written to all members of the LabourStart group on Facebook – and to the ‘Free the Blackadder One’ group as well, and to all LabourStart correspondents.  I’ve also posted to the Wall of a number of Facebook groups I belong to.  Within minutes, the number of active users on UnionBook has jumped.  I’ll be leaving soon, but it will be interesting to see how many sign up in the first day … More on my UnionBook blog.

Please check out my UnionBook blog – that’s where I’ll put all updates about this project.