Inside LabourStart

Some odds and ends – things that have kept me busy these last few days …

Twitter: We now have Canadian English and French feeds (thanks to Derek) and they’re quite popular. Today we mailed to over 9,000 Canadians on our list in the hope of making them even better known.  At the moment, the English feed has 364 followers; the French one has 20.

App: As I reported below, we’re pretty much ready to launch the iPad version and will probably do this in the next day or two.  It will, however, take Apple a couple of weeks to approve this and make it available in the App Store. Versions will quickly follow for other platforms including the iPhone, Android, etc, and other languages.

Campaigns: We discovered that there was a bug in our software that allowed people to sign up twice from the same email address – this has now been fixed.  This may also help speed up the system — and we’ll be making several other small tweaks to the code to make it work faster and more efficiently.  We launched a new campaign on Peru; publicity and translations begin today. A new campaign, just over the horizon, deals with Italy.  We have several more in the pipeline.  I’ve followed up about three campaigns that this week have reached the two-month mark (Turkey, Kazakhstan and Italy), asking our partners if they should be closed or if we can somehow reawaken interest in them.  We now have a way to show supporters which campaigns they’ve signed up to and which ones they’ve missed – this is now highlighted in the email they receive when they send off a campaign message and will be included elsewhere in our system.  The goal is to get our supporters to sign up to even more campaigns. I’ve given our Korean translator direct access to input campaigns, and have asked for a translation of the news as well.  There have been a couple of small tweaks to the campaign design – there is now a required field for the photo (and no longer a need to code in the HTML to display it); also, it’s now easier to input partner information as the HTML is now displayed.

News: While we set up the Dutch platform successfully, the Norwegian one caused problems.  I’ve now made the changes which I think will allow our Norwegian correspondents to see an interface in their language – we’ll test this tomorrow.  This already works in English, Russian and French.

Fundraising: I’ve been doing a lot of work on global and British unions; we’ve gotten some good commitments to donations this year but have a lot more work to do.  I’ll give a full report later on.

Survey: We completed the second annual survey of trade union use of the net and began publicity of the results.  I’ll be making the full survey results public later this week.  This was our largest and most successful survey ever, and we learned a lot.   We also added several hundred new people to our mailing list.

Conference 2012: An organizing committee has been formed in Sydney and they are due to meet soon. We are all using Basecamp to share a calendar, to-do lists, messages and documents (writeboards).  All the members of the committee as well as Derek and myself have logged in and used the system.

I think we have a version of the app ready for launch – but a limited launch, with the following conditions:

• This app should be launched for the iPad first.  The iPad doesn’t require us to shrink the size of our campaigns pages – they fit neatly on an iPad screen.  We can work on a small-screen friendly version of the campaigns in the meanwhile.
• This requires a bit of live testing – according to the forums on Conduit Mobile, the tool we’re using to create the app, the biggest problem is actually resolved only when the app is native – in other words, comes from the Apple App Store.  That problem is this: when you click on a campaign, or any other link to a web page, there is no Back button.  Here’s a discussion of this problem on the Conduit forum.
• The app will be English only with a commitment to roll out other languages in the next versions.

What do you all think?

Improvements to ActNOW campaigns: There’s now a new field for inputting the photo which will accompany each campaign.  This will be very useful for the front page redesign (every campaign needs a photo) and the new app (see below).  The field we use for entering details about our partners is now partially filled in to make it easier for people; I will be writing to all campaign translators about this.

App for tablets and smartphones: I’ve made some real progress on this.  There’s really only one or two more things to do before we launch, which I aim to do by the end of February.  If you’re interesting in seeing what we have already, email me and I’ll send you a link to a web app that approximates the final version.

Twitter: I’ve been aggressively promoting the various versions and there’s a steady flow of people signing up as followers. In the last 3 days, the English Twitter account has picked up 76 new followers, and the Canadian Twitter account even more.

Interface for correspondents: For some time now we’ve had English, French and Russian versions of this — today I requested our translators in several other languages to translate a short file which will make things easier for our nearly 1,000 volunteer correspondents, many of whom do not have English as their first language.

Conference 2012: Andrew and I have had regular Skype calls; we’ve set up a Basecamp account from which we manage everything; we have a venue (thanks to the NSWTF) in Sydney and we have the beginnings of an organizing committee.

Conference 2014: I’ve had discussions with a potential LabourStart staff person for Germany to even now begin the work of raising our profile there, which is a pre-condition for a successful conference in May 2014 in Berlin.  I’ve also made tentative plans to meet with the ITUC in Brussels next month to discuss this and other issues.  They are aware of our intention to hold our Global Solidarity Conference on the eve of their congress.

Fundraising: We normally do a pitch to our readers in May, and we will do this, but I’ve been approaching unions even now to begin the work as our expenses are skyrocketing and we need to raise more money than ever before.  Derek and Andrew have done terrific work in the past in Canada and Australia; I’ve gotten some great commitments from British unions this year.  Anyone reading this who can help – please email me.

Tech problems – newsfeeds and Unicode: We’ve had problems with the Finnish RSS news feed – some characters not rendering correctly – I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to get this to work. If the solution I’ve deployed solves the problems, I’ll sort this out for all other languages as well.

Broken link on our home page: Derek noticed that the ‘Join a union’ link had stopped working suddenly.  This turns out to be our only program written in Python.  I have no idea what has gone wrong, but have contacted our web host, 1&1 Internet, and they’ll look into it.

Wikipedia: I update our page there every month, both adding new links, numbers and campaigns, and also monitoring to make sure the page isn’t vandalized.  Many people visit this page and we need to treat it as an important gateway to the LabourStart project.

New campaigns on the horizon: In the last 24 hours we’ve had three requests – from the USA, Peru and Italy.  We’ll see if we can find a way to stagger these and not overload our lists.

Please check this out.

It’s been a busy day …

• All recent supporters of our campaigns have now been added to our mailing lists on MailChimp – we’re seeing signficant growth for the German list, which indicates that our campaigns are now being promoted there by at least one union.
• The mass mailing regarding our Egypt campaign has gone out for translation and we’ve gotten translations back already in at least two languages.
• I’ve done further work on our Wikipedia entry, including trying to create an entry for UnionBook but am encountering some resistance there.
• I’ve written to comrades in Georgia about getting a Georgian language version of our campaigns up – particularly the current Georgian one.  Am awaiting their reply.
• Mac Urata at the ITF has agreed to help us get a Japanese version of the campaigns up and running.
• On UnionBook, I’ve managed to sort comments in Groups in reverse date order – something which people have asked for.
• I’ve begun the process of creating a secure directory (URLs would begin with https://) on our site – this is needed if we use Facebook for some pages, which has been done for our French version.
• It’s been suggested that we could get an article about LabourStart published in a left-wing Esperanto magazine; I’ve asked one of our correspondents who speaks the language to take care of this.
• Using a service called Conduit Mobile I’ve been doing further work on a small, simple UnionBook app for mobile devices.
• I did extensive work on our newswires today, including getting the French RSS feed to work properly, reviewing the ActNOW RSS feed in French and Norwegian (now fixed), the Health and Safety wire in French (seems OK), and tweaking our new French language newswire for North Africa.  In addition I completed work on migrating all the regional newswires over to our new database – finally.

• We’ve resumed the book of the month. The next mass mailing will feature it. Today, social media was used to publicize. This month, it’s Joe Hill.
• ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow has agreed to open our conference with a video message. She can’t be there, but this is the next best thing. We hope to get the message in time to allow us to subtitle it in Turkish (and Arabic?)
• Our first app for a smartphone is nearly ready (within 24 hours). If you have a Nokia smartphone, let me know. We have submitted something to their app store. (The iOS and Adroid versions are in the works.)
• We’ve sent a long message to PSI about their Korea campaign with suggestions about how to revive it after two months online. Some 3,000 of the 3,200 messages were sent in the first week.
• At the request of our Russian comrades, we’ve now closed down the Valentin Urusov campaign. We may need to revive it later this year, as he is still in jail.
• We will almost certainly have a campaign focussed on India next week (in support of Suzuki workers).  We’re waiting for final approval from the IMF.
• Work on the upcoming Global Solidarity Conference is going well, if a bit behind the scenes at the moment. I have weekly phone conferences with our staffer in Istanbul, Eyup. This Monday, we’ll begin the process of approving who gets subsidies. I have made special efforts in the last week to encourage participation from Jordan, Palestine, Iraq and Georgia.
• We have a much more prominent signup form on our home page now for our mailing list (in English only at the moment). This will be an important feature of our site redesign, which will begin probably just after our conference ends.
• We have a new newswire for Fiji – created at the request of the Australian unions, who are using it.
• I’ve upgraded our Facebook group – not sure exactly what that means, but people now need to be approved to join and there’s a lot more activity there than before.
• UnionBook has reverted to much more staid colors after a pink and purple phase. No one seems to have noticed …

• 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.

I’ve taken the very first step by registering to be an Apple developer.  More updates soon.

I’ve taken the first steps toward creating a version of LabourStart — really just baby steps.  But if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you might want to have a look and make suggestions.

From you iPhone/iPod, using Safari go to http://www.labourstart.org/i

If you want to save this as an icon on your home screen, simply click on the “+” button on the bottom of the page and select ‘Add to home screen’.

As I say, this is not even the Beta version yet … but you can see where we’re heading.

This image now appears on the front page of LabourStart in English only — it links to m.labourstart.org

All the other languages are now ready to go — see, for example, Spanish and French.  We simply need to decide how to link to these on those language home pages.