Inside LabourStart

We’ll be holding our 2010 LabourStart conference in Canada and have to choose which of two dates works best for most of us.  Please use the comments to reply to this so everyone can see who can attend when and the decision making process will be more transparent.  (In other words, please do not email Eric or Derek about this – let us all know in the comments.)

The two possible dates are:

• 18 – 20 June
• 9 – 11 July

We have six more weeks until the end of the year and I thought I’d share with you some of the things that we’ll be doing in that time:

1. Finalizing the date and venue for our 2010 conference.
2. Launching more campaigns – the next one likely to be another campaign in support of Sinter Metal workers in Turkey.
3. Renewing UnionBook now that we seem to have largely cracked the problem of (new) spammers.  This will include some serious publicity to involve more people, and the launch of new groups.
4. Another survey of our readers — probably once again on the subject of campaigns.
5. Preparation for the launch of our Labour Video of the Year competition — and joint work with the DC Metro Labor Council on databases of labour films and labour film festivals.
6. Announcing the end of the Labour Website of the Year competition.

It’s been a while since the last update on our progress, so here’s a quick one with not, yet anyway, a lot of content.

Partly because of a strike at McMaster University we’ve not yet set a date.  But that should happen in the next week as it settled last Tuesday.  It looks very affordable, assuming we can do some effective, but not huge, fundraising.  We’ll get preferred rates at the uni by virtue of our being sponsored by the Labour Studies programme.

The only remaing, and the biggest and most frustrating, hurdle is setting a date.  We need a few days for our draft agenda (details to come), but in order to get some discounts on meeting rooms we need to have a few people stay in residence rooms, which means they must be empty of students, but there are other conference already booked for the inter-session period, plus we don’t want to conflict with the ITUC conference or the two major Canadian unions-and-tech conferences (CALM and LabourTech) or any major union conferences and conventions… you get the idea.

But we’re within spitting distance of having a date.  Then starts the fundraising and the detailed planning, so check in here regularly.