Inside LabourStart

It’s now been a week since we moved our campaigns over to the new environmentally-friendly server in Iceland. At the same time, we launched a major new campaign online (in support of Hava-Is, the Turkish aviation workers union). The good news is the dog that didn’t bark in the night: we had a total of zero (0) complaints from people that the link to the campaign did not work. We saw no noticeable freeze-up of the LabourStart site when a campaign went live. And 1&1 Internet will no longer threaten to shut us down every time we have a controversial campaign.

There are still many things that need to be fixed, but a lot of them were fixed this week. Most of the home pages now show current lists of all campaigns. Campaigns are showing totals of supporters (though this has to be better automated, and we should return to showing the totals for all languages). Latest news about the campaigns is still not working on the campaign page — though the ActNOW link is showing on the news pages. So, still some work to be done here.

We’ll be launching a new campaign today in support of oil workers in Iraq and have additional campaigns in the pipeline form Algeria, Korea and Kenya.

We also promoted a couple of campaigns (Thailand, Indonesia) which were not hosted on LabourStart; the Indonesian one resulted in a swift victory.

I had articles published in In These Times (USA), Our Times (Canada) and Tribune (UK) about the IUF’s recent “We are the 53 campaign” which won a sudden and very important victory last week. I was also interviewed for a new union solidarity initiative in North West England, for their newsletter.

Sydney conference: Andrew Casey was in London last week, so we had the chance to catch up and plan things. Andrew’s now using Basecamp, which is where we’re putting all the documents, discussion and so on regarding the conference. At the moment, things look good.

Headline news –

• Turkish list grows by nearly 50% following the campaign in support of aviation workers union Hava-Is
• All mailing lists now just a month away from breaking through the 100,000 barrier (only 2,462 to go)
• Social networks – FB page growing (up 134), group stagnating; 215 more Twitter followers in English; another 144 join UnionBook; LinkedIn group to reach 1,000 by mid-summer – with no effort by us …
• We are a month or two away from having 1,000 correspondents

Mailing lists (greater than 100)

Total for all lists: 97,538 [95,921]

English: 72,726 [71,816]
French: 5,627 [5,387]
Italian: 3,883 [3,877]
Spanish: 3,775 [3,707]
Norwegian: 2,424 [2,433]
German: 2,195 [2,160]
Russian: 1,768 [1,767]
Turkish: 1,161 [801]
Dutch: 736 [734]
Chinese: 357 [357]
Polish: 306 [305]
Portuguese: 246 [246]
Japanese: 205 [ 205]
Farsi 188 [193]
Finnish: 184 [184]
Swedish: 170 [171]
Arabic: 114 [114]
Hebrew 106 [100]
Danish: 106 [106]

And just below the radar:

Korean 93 [93]

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 5,144 [5,100]

Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,775 [4,766]
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 4,495 [4,361]
Like LabourStart page (French): 195 [180]

Twitter followers –
English: 6,414 [6,199]

The following numbers will be updated next month, unless someone wants to do this now …
French: 110 [104]
Japanese: 25 [24]
Spanish: 20 [18]
Norwegian: 9 [8]
Italian: 8 [6]
German: 7 [8]
Turkish: 6 [5]
Portuguese: 4 [5]
Russian: 4 [5]
Dutch: 2 [2]

Union group on Flickr: 687 [682]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 890 [842]

Website

Correspondents: 978 [972] – 4 pending

Unique visits to the site this month : 630,351 [590,196]
Peak day: 24,828 – 21.5.12
Page views this month: 1,271,874 [1,289,430]

Here’s the status of where we stand with each of the next campaigns in the queue:

• SNAPAP members in Algeria – on hunger strike. Waiting to hear from the ITUC, to get a formal request to move forward on this.
• Korea: dramatic campaign at Ssangyoung motor – including some suicides. Waiting to get final text etc from the KMWF.
• Kenya: lockout of flower workers. Asked them for some media coverage; we’re still trying to find a least one link on the web to the story they wish to campaign on.
• Iraq: Oil workers. Campaign was proposed on 9 May; we received confirmation from ICEM yesterday (30 May) to go ahead.  This will go ahead tomorrow.

This has now been updated, here.

I’ve responded to emails requesting urgent action campaigns this morning from, or on behalf, of:

• Now live! Turkish aviation workers – facing a gov’t ban on the right to strike and the sacking of hundreds of workers
• SNAPAP members in Algeria – on hunger strike
• Korea: dramatic campaign at Ssangyoung motor – including some suicides
• Kenya: lockout of flower workers
• Iraq: Oil workers
• Indonesia: This is not a request for a campaign, but to promote one already on change.org.
• Thailand: Wal-mart – stop human rights abuses in your factories.  Also already live on sumofus.org – we’ll just give it a boost, as the IUF did 5 days ago.

I plan to begin work today on a draft agreement between us and any campaign partners laying out what we pledge to do and what they pledge to do.  We need this as more and more campaign requests come through.

This morning I did the first stages of the switchover which should be transparent to our users. Every campaign now automatically re-directs to our new server. The pages showing campaign statistics also redirect. I’ve checked and see records being added to our database of supporters.  In previous tests, we’ve seen that the messages do reach their targets.  The next stage is to make this more “native” – with no redirects.  A big thanks to Chris Croome at WebArchitects, Derek Blackadder and Andy Funnell for helping to make this happen.  The real test will be what happens when we announce a new campaign – will it crash the server?  Fingers crossed …

(Don’t know what I’m talking about? Read more here.)

Could you all have a look at the blog postings for the last week (see below)?  I’ve asked for help and advice on a few things (Zendesk, Wikipedia, translations), but got no response. Thanks.

Meanwhile, some highlights of the last week …

LabourStart TV: I posted our first original content for a very long time, an interview with Teamster official Tim Beaty.  There have been over 300 views and 4 comments posted.

Campaigns:

• I added a line of text updating the Bahrain campaign to a number of languages, at the request of the Education International.
• I asked PSI and UNISON about continuing with the Colombia campaign after two months – UNISON is keen to do so, but we’re waiting for an answer from PSI.  The campaign has gotten a healthy 7,845 messages sent.
• We launched a campaign in support of workers’ rights activists in Mexico; in the first week online it got 5,550 supporters.
• The Matteo Parlati campaign in Italy was closed; the first day in court was on Friday.  Matteo now no longer needs to report every day to a police station, and his actual trial has been pushed back to November.  A total of 8,357 messages were sent.
• A lot more work done on the move of our campaigns to the new server in Iceland; see below for full details.  The move will take place tomorrow (Tuesday).
• Spent a lot of time trying to stop people from being able to send off multiple messages for the same campaign using the same email address, with only limited success.  We will aim to have this working properly on the new server.

Wikipedia: I attempted the monthly update of our page there, but stopped.  See blog post below.

Next Tuesday at 09:00 London time we’ll be moving LabourStart’s campaigns over to a new server based in Iceland.  In previous posts here I’ve explained why we’re doing that, but to sum up:

• Keeping the campaigns and news on the same server means that if the campaigns cause a problem (e.g., a target threatens libel or accuses us of spamming them) our web hosting company freaks out and threatens to shut us down (and has shut us down).  Separation means this will not happen again.
• When a new campaign gets announced to our 70,000+ strong English mailing list, the immediate flood of supporters can crash our server.  When both campaigns and news were on one server, this meant that LabourStart’s news pages became inaccessible, correspondents were unable to login, and so on.  This should not be the case after the switchover.

I expect there to be bugs and problems, but the actual down-time should be very short if everything is prepared correctly.  Nevertheless, expect that from 09:00 until 10:00 on Tuesday morning in London, our campaigns may be offline.

Matteo Parlati.

This campaign closed today after three months – it got 8,357 supporters making it one of our larger efforts.

Matteo’s trial finally begins at the end of this week (Friday, 25 May).

The union will let us know if they need any further help.

Meanwhile, a few weeks ago, it seemed as though the state prosecutors had opened an investigation into our efforts; but this does not now seem to be the case — or at least we’ve heard nothing since.

See here.