Inside LabourStart

This one might get some traction in Europe – especially Italy and Germany, I hope.  Please spread the word.

Often when we launch a new campaign, and do a mass mailing, we get email complaints from people who say “it doesn’t work”.  What they sometimes mean is that there is a very long delay when they try to click through a campaign.  This is particularly true when a mass mailing goes out and several hundred people may be trying to simultaneously send off messages.  There can be a lot of reasons for that, but I’ve discovered one of them and have fixed this today.

Our campaigns are listed in a massive, flat ASCII text file – not a relational database.  This is a relic of the 20th century version of LabourStart.  We’re using a file that is over three million bytes in size when the optimum size for this sort of file is more like one million bytes.  By moving the closed campaigns to a different file, I’ve been able to reduce the size of that file by 90%.  Which should mean a much faster access to the data in it.

In addition, one tiny thing that might slow down the display of the page has been the call to Google Analytics.  As we no longer use this, I’ve removed a few lines of code at the bottom of the page — these lines were invisible to users, but may have caused a small lag.

In addition, and somewhat related to this, our web hosting company pointed out that the scripts we execute every 15 minutes which build all our newswires and stuff like that, may take longer than 15 minutes to run.  (There are probably over 200 scripts being run every 15 minutes.)  So I’ve changed this to run every half hour instead.  In theory, this should reduce some strain on the server, though we may want to look into a better solution down the road.

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.

It happens to the best of us – we don’t always remember to sign up to every single LabourStart campaign.

And we know what we have some campaigns with 9,477 supporters while others languish with only 2,989 people backing them.  So how do we bridge that gap?  How do we remind those 6,488 people that they’ve missed a campaign without sending them constant reminders by email?

Here’s how:

http://www.labourstart.org/cgi-bin/solidarityforever/mycampaigns.cgi?email=labourstart@gmail.com&langcode=en

Just change the address in that URL to your own address to see how it works.

I’m going to embed this information wherever we can in the next few days.

Right now, there’s a very simple version of it at work — when you send off a message in English, you get an email back confirming what you’ve sent.

It now includes this text at the bottom:

*** NEW! *** Which campaigns have I participated in?  Which ones did I miss?
Click here to find out:
http://www.labourstart.org/cgi-bin/solidarityforever/mycampaigns.cgi?email=labourstart@gmail.com&langcode=en

The participant’s email address — in this case, my gmail address — is automatically embedded in the URL.

In future, I want to show the actual list which that script displays in the email message and also on the final screen they see when they completed the campaign.  And of course I’ll want to do versions in other languages — but I want the English one sorted first.

I hope that this will boost support across all the campaigns.

This campaign is going live now, but I’m holding off for a bit on publicity because one of the two corporate email addresses has bounced, and we have no news on LS nor on the union’s own website, about this struggle.

Once those two issues have resolved, we’ll push this out for translation and publicyt.

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.

At the request of UNI Global Union, we’re launching a campaign together with the FNV in support of striking Dutch cleaners. Let’s hope this is a big one.

After two months, and at the request of the ITGLWF, we’re closing our campaign Pakistan: Release trade union leaders now today. This is the only one of the four campaigns we’ve closed recently that did not reach 5,000 messages.

Today I closed the Deri-Is campaign in support of sacked leather workers which has been running for 3 months on LabourStart. Like the GEA campaign closed yesterday, this one too had well over 5,000 supporters – though only a very small number of those signed up to the Turkish language campaign. I’ve asked the union for details of what the effect of the campaign was, and if there was any response from the employer or any change on the ground.

At the request of the International Metalworkers Federation, we’re closing the campaign launched two months ago targeting the German-owned GEA company which had locked out workers in Turkey. (The company is currently involved in negotiations with the union and the IMF, and acknowledged the received of many thousands of email messages.)

This campaign was the fifth one in less than two months to reach the target of 5,000 messages sent.

In the previous eighteen months, only one other campaign reached that (the CUPW campaign in Canada).

In fact, a glance at the last ten campaigns launched in late 2010 showed that only one got over 3,000 messages sent.

So campaigns are growing much larger – in fact, they’re pretty much double the size now they were a year ago.

The Education International has asked us to close down the Bahrain campaign we launched only 7 weeks ago — and which had attracted a healthy 5,160 supporters — and replace it with a new one today.

The new campaign shifts the focus to the leader of the teachers’ union in that country (pictured), Mahdi ‘Issa Mahdi Abu Dheeb.

This will be the first campaign we do which makes use of the new “src” tag, allowing us to see for the first time how people are coming to our campaigns.

Please spread the word.