Inside LabourStart

Public appearances in the UK: We’ll be represented at three upcoming UK-based events.  On 19.1, I’ll be speaking at the Southend Labour Party. On 24.1, Edd will speak at the Unions 21 tech seminar. And on 13-14 March, we’re organizing a panel at the E-Campaigning Forum in Oxford.

Campaigns: We’re about to launch two new ones today – on El Salvador and the Philippines.  These are our first new campaigns in nearly 6 weeks — it has been a very quiet season.  As reported below, we now have the campaigns newswire working correctly in 19 languages, in both JavaScript and RSS versions – please make sure to promote this in your country.

Book: Sales have reached 377.  Let’s all push hard to get that number up to 500 over the next few days.  We were briefly an Amazon.co.uk best-seller, hitting the top 1,000 books they were selling, and reaching number 2 in our category.  A Kindle edition is coming soon, and we’re starting to think about doing another book.  Meanwhile, I expect to complete my book for UCS by the end of January – the working title is  Making Unions Stronger – Using The Internet Better.

Labour Newswire: We’ve pushed our newswires aggressively to UK unions, and it’s bearing fruit.  We had 40 UK sites listed, that dropped down to 20 after Edd removed all the dead wood, and now we’re back up to 28. You can see the up-to-date list of all 302 sites using our newswire here.

Today in Labour History: We now have 11 people adding content to this; almost every day, there is something on our front page in English.   (And more things coming soon.)

Inactive correspondents: Edd has gone through the 500 or so correspondents who’ve not been active, writing individually to each one, and giving support (such as new passwords) where needed.  In a few weeks, we’ll be deleting those who are showing no interest in continuing.

Upcoming global solidarity conferences: I’ve finally heard (today) from a colleague in Germany about the possibility of a conference in Berlin in May 2014; I’ll be following up.  Derek has been in discussions with people in Vancouver about a conference there in late 2014.

Fund-raising: We’ve gotten generous donations from two unions in the USA (United Steelworkers and the Amalgamated Transportation Union) and hoping for more.  We’ve sent out a few copies of the campaigns book to donors who have given £1,000 or more in the last couple of years.

Campaigns: We launched three campaigns during this 25-day period – “Cameroon: Musicians union march attacked by police“, “Nissan USA’s union busting is a global shame“, and “Netherlands: Union organizers, MP arrested; denied access to care-home workers“. We closed down several – including the Pakistan fire campaign (one of our very largest) and the Turkey DHL campaign. We’ve also started work on the ActNOW DIY project, but this is turning out to be quite complex and will take some time.

Campaign successes book: We’re nearly ready with this — a short book which we’ll distribute at cost which goes over our many victories in the last ten years.  The working title is Campaigning online – and winning: How LabourStart’s ActNOW campaigns are making unions stronger.

Labour Book of the Month: We’ve been exploring some interesting options including working with UK booksellers (three have come forward), reviving our account with Powells.com, selling magazine subscriptions (we’ve been talking with Hazards and International Union Rights), selling our TUC book on the Iraqi labour movement (we have 100 in stock) and selling our campaign successes book (see above).  At present, we earn very, very little from our bookselling partnership with UCS.

Today in Labour History: This is nearly complete – we can now have multiple users and we’ve already got quite a few dates in the database, which can now be sorted by country and language, just like LabourStart’s news database.

Fundraising: We’ve now sent out our brochure and individual letters to the heads of every union in Australia.

Labour Newswires: Edd has gone through the whole directory deleting all the dead links and we’re down to 286 sites that use the newswire — 40% of where we were before, when we had over 700. It’s time to rebuild the list by getting all the newswires working, adding new ones, and promoting them aggressively.

Conferences: Work has begun — initially just some exploratory emails — on a Berlin conference in May 2014. Oh yes, and we held a Global Solidarity Conference in Sydney.

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.

I was invited to Gottingen, Germany yesterday to give a talk at a conference with that title.  My talk is here.  It was a great opportunity to begin building bridges with the German trade union movement, as the event was organized by their foundation (the Hans Boeckler Stiftung) and I was on a panel with two German trade unionists, one from the national center (DGB), the other from the ILO.  All this is very important in the run-up to the LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference due to be held in May 2014 in Berlin.

We need to do a lot of work to raise LabourStart’s profile in Germany in the next 30 months.  Here is where we stand today:

Mailing list: 1,271 names (up from about 800 a year ago)

Correspondents: we have at least 11 correspondents in Germany – though they are not particularly active.  (We’ve had over 3,000 news stories about Germany posted on LabourStart – but mostly by correspondents from outside the country – see here. )

We should aim to grow these numbers over time.