Inside LabourStart

OK, so not weekly.  But I was in Copenhagen for three days last week attending the founding congress of IndustriALL global union, so that’s why I’m late with this roundup of some recent news.

Social Media: I began using SocialBro to increase our visibility on Twitter (see note below).  We’ve gone up from 6,414 to 6,642 followers since the beginning of this month – a growth of about 10 per day.  (We picked up 44 in one day thanks to a mention in one of our mailings.)  At this rate, we’ll reach 8,500 followers by the end of this year.  On Facebook, our Page – www.facebook.com/labourstart.org –  is rapidly approaching the size of our Group, as we had hoped.  The Page has 4,627 ‘likes’ while the Group has 4,771 ‘members’.  As you may recall, there are certain advantages to the Page, which we built long after the Group was launched.  At the very end of March last year, we started our Page (with zero followers) and we had 4,332 members of the LabourStart Group.  So you can see that all the growth is taking place in recruiting new fans or followers for the Page, which has been growing at the rate of about 10 per day, just like Twitter.

Campaigns: I posted something about campaigns that have zero followers earlier this month and had several interesting responses (see below).  Two new campaigns were launched this week, one for the ITF and one for IndustriALL; ten days ago we launched our Li Wangyang campaign which is now over 5,700 messages sent. Two campaigns are closing this weekend – Mexico and Colombia.  I fixed character encoding issues in the news iframe that appears on campaign pages.  I also fixed the script that shows supporters for a campaign so that it doesn’t update the overall numbers (this made it look like campaign numbers went up and down throughout the day). I fixed the mycampaigns script (which shows you which campaigns you have participated in) so it works with the new system and with different languages, again.  I’ve been having a discussion with our volunteer translators for Turkish; we now may have a solution that ensures timely translations of both campaigns and mailings, which is very important now that we have 1,244 Turkish addresses (up from 778 since the beginning of the year – a gain of 466, up more than 37%).

Mailing lists: There’s now a prominent link on our home page in English to sign up to the mailing list (this had disappeared for a while, though we have it for other languages) – and I removed all traces I could find of links to join any of our earlier mailing lists.  The total size of the lists is 98,356.

Writing: I had an article published in In These Times (about the launch of IndustriALL).  I’ll be doing another tomorrow for Solidarity.  I approached a number of other publications about writing on the same subject — Red Pepper, Progress and the Big Issue — but none of them responded.

Donations: The only big donation in the last couple of weeks came from LO Norway, which gave NOK 30,000 (£3,200).  We’ve raised over £9,000 since the beginning of April, with another £6,400 in our Canadian account.  (Derek can give a breakdown of which Canadian unions have made substantial donations or pledges.)  This is pretty much equal to what we had raised last year by this time.

Some of the things I’ve been working on for the last week:

Campaigns:

• Closed two campaigns (Kamal Abbas – Egypt, Abdolreza Ghanbari – Iran) without clear results yet.  Both cases continue.  The Ghanbari campaign set a new standard for us, and with over 17,000 messages sent it was our biggest campaign ever.  As Derek Blackadder points out in the comments, this means our next goal has to be 20,000.
• We also launched new campaigns this week in support of oil workers in Egypt and public sector workers in Algeria; both campaigns have gotten off to a slow start.
• We expect new campaigns to be launched shortly in support of workers in Korea, Kenya and possibly Turkey and Spain.
• The campaign counter is now fixed, though not yet fully automated (we’re unable to use ‘cron’ on the new server, for those of you who understand these things.)  I also tweaked a few more things the resulted from the move to our new campaigns server, such as ensuring that ‘ActNOW’ links that appear next to news stories point directly to the new site.  I fixed the campaigns script so you should no longer be able to choose ‘Select your country’ as your country (as many people have done).

Mailing lists: We are very close to 100,000 names.  When we cross this threshold, we’ll need to raise an additional £1,600 a year.  We’re going to attempt to grow the Danish and Swedish lists, and to find volunteer translators to help with mailings to these lists and campaigns.  (This is currently covered by Espen who does it in Norwegian, but it would be better to have versions in all three Scandinavian languages.)

ILO: We’ve gotten no further news from the ITUC and GUFs about the employer attempt to block discussion of workers’ rights at this year’s International Labour Conference. We have told all that we’re ready and willing to do an online campaign on a moment’s notice.

Writing: I had articles published this week in both Solidarity and the Morning Star about the case of US politician John Edwards.

Office: I’ve begun looking for an office for LabourStart as I will be moving house by late September and will no longer be able to work from home.  At the moment we’re budgetting about £600 per month (£7,200 a year), which will either get us a very small office or possibly a studio apartment.

Intern: I looked into what it would cost to hire an intern at the London Living Wage; I think this and an office are the next two steps toward professionalizing LabourStart even more and expanding our capacity.  At £8.30 per hour, and calculating a 35 hour week, that would be an additional £15,100 per year we’d need to raise.

Donations: We received £1,100 in the last week from two British unions (CWU – £1,000; Napo – £100), £126 from the OECTA in Canada and a number of individual donors (£222).

Some highlights of the last week:

Campaigns closing: The Peru campaign was closed down.  We asked about closing the Greece campaign, still waiting to hear from the comrades there.  The Canada (Acadia) campaign was closed.   The Netherlands cleaners campaign was closed.

Campaigns starting: We launched the MMP lock-out campaign for Unite on Tuesday.  We will shortly be launching another campaign in support of a jailed Thai trade unionist at the request of ICEM.

Campaign problems: Some people are still managing to send multiple messages to the same campaign using the same email address.  I’ve taken further steps to block this and will check to see if it’s working now.  I’ve also noted that increasingly our server struggles to cope with hundreds of simultaneous requests when we launch a new campaign.  I took some steps to tighten up our code (and reduce the number of steps one has to take).  We may need to consider moving the campaign software to a separate, dedicated server.  (There are, of course, cost implications in doing so.)

North Korea: I’ve begun work on trying to highlight the situation of workers in the hermit kingdom – and we now have a special North Korea page on LabourStart at http://nk.labourstart.org.

LinkedIn: Our group there continues to grow (842 members, with no effort on our part to promote this) – and they now get a weekly message from me.  Last week’s launched our May Day appeal for support.

Facebook: We’re seeing a huge spike in Facebook Insights – more people than ever before are forwarding on, commenting on, and liking stuff we post.  Our last “reach” is 21,232 in the last week; a month ago, it was 2,910.  That’s an increase of more than 700% in one month.

May Day appeal: This went live 6 days ago with a mass mailing to our English list.  Details on how much we have raised so far and how we’ve promoted this appear on the May Day appeal page here.  At the moment, we’ve raised £969 in 6 days.

May Day event: Our May Day event on Facebook has attracted 372 people; I’ve been able to message them and the more than 3,100 who have been invited by those people.  Hopefully, we’ll have many more by Tuesday.

May Day book: We’ve agreed to coordinate sales of a new graphic novel about May Day with our partners at UCS.  Details on Monday.

Union Solidarity International (USI): This is a new initiative by a number of British unions, spearheaded by Unite the Union.  The suggested a meeting, and I duly met with their coordinator.  They are going live on May Day and have asked to work with us.

Check out the page – I’ll indicate there what we’ve done, how much we’ve raised, and so on.

As I was travelling in the USA for part of this time, I have an excuse. Anyway, here are some of the things I’ve been up to these past 3 weeks.

Campaigns: I’ve closed a number of those that reached the 3 month limit, and launched three others. Our biggest campaign ever was launched during this period. I began work on a new system to allow others – senior correspondents, for example – to launch campaigns while I am travelling. I also did a full review of the last two campaigns and what’s been translated and what not; as a result, we now have campaigns and mailings done for Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish and Hebrew. I’m still waiting for responses from our translators for Korean, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish and Vietnamese. Ideally, all campaigns will appear in 18 languages, and we’ll mail to 18 lists.  As a result of these campaigns, we now have over 93,000 names on our mailing lists.

Social media: I dealt with problems that arose from repeated attacks on our Twitter account (now solved). UnionBook grew to more than 5,000 members for the first time.

Partners: I set up a meeting at the ITUC, to take place in Brussels next week. I continued fundraising efforts with GUFs and British unions. So far this year, nine GUFs have given money and seven British unions have either pledged or donated.

Conference 2012: Work continues in Sydney; our organizing committee there is growing and meeting regularly and we’re sharing information on Basecamp.

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.

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.

Full details are here. We’ve been assured that people or organizations who have been nominated in previous years are allowed to be nominated again.

On May Day, we sent out an appeal to our lists in English and Spanish and were able to raise a considerable amount of money for our project (considerable, that is, by our rather modest standards).  But looking things over, it seems as if our volunteer translators never translated this into other languages.

Some of our lists have gotten quite large lately – the French list has 3,135, the Norwegian 2,367, and the German 799.   (Other large lists seem less likely to generate a response – though we do have 693 on the Turkish list and 514 on the Russian list.)

Perhaps we should do a new, revised text and mail to these lists as well?

In the last four days, in addition to watching our Palestine campaign grow, showing off our new conference poster, and and thinking about Cafe Press (see earlier posts), here are a few of the things that have been on the agenda at LabourStart this week …

1. Have been holding an email conversation with our internet service provider (1&1) about the possible listing of their IP address in the SORBS spam database – some people sending off protest messages to Georgia have received reports that indicate this. Still investigating what’s going on.
2. Attended a meeting at the Trades Union Congress to discuss Egypt and expressed a willingness to do more – including a possible campaign in support of labour law reform in that country.
3. Fixed the newswire which is now featured on LabourStart’s French page on Facebook to open links in a new window (as is the case for the campaigns newswire).
4. Received another nice donation from a Canadian union, processed it and had Derek thank them.
5. Spoke with the International Metalworkers Federation about a possible campaign on Malawi – but after consulting with the ITUC, this has been placed on hold.
6. Provided advice on social networking to UNI, which is campaigning against Deutsche Telekom – a union-buster in the USA.
7. Mailed all members of UnionBook about our conference, the campaigns, and the need to recruit some 900 new members in 40 days.
8. Improved daily campaign stats program to show only the current month; could not get it to show in reverse order.
9. Backed up mailing lists, MySQL databases, and all files on the website.
10. Added campaign supporters to MailChimp lists.
11. Removed spam signups to the conference database.
12. Updated conference website with the Turkish version of the ‘respect’ form.
13. Sorted out tickets for travel to Istanbul in September for a meeting with our conference committee.
14. Sent out the weekly mailing in German.
15. Sent out a mailing to over 600 Francophone Canadians.
16. And answered dozens and dozens of emails.