Inside LabourStart

Click on the image to enlarge:

I was forced to launch the new version of our home page in English prematurely due to a human error (my error), but in the end that’s good.  There are a number of things that weren’t ready just yet, so I’ll be updating this blog with details of the changes I’ve made today and in the next few days in line with things I know we need to fix, and suggestions that are coming in.  Please keep those suggestions coming!

Here are some of the fixes done today:

1. A link has been added at the bottom of the page to the old home page — this is primarily to allow us to identify things which are there, but aren’t yet on the new page.
2. I’ve restored a link to our Working Women page.
3. And to our Newswires page.
4. I restored the ‘view more news from your country or region’ box to the bottom list of current news stories.
5. I restored the ‘submit news’ link.
6. And finally, I restored the link to our privacy page.

There’s a lot more to do (including making this work for all languages), so consider this a process and please be patient.

Annual survey: We’ve gone up from 500 responses to 2,082. We still need 872 more to beat last year’s record. We got an article on the TUC blog, Stronger Unions, which has helped boost interest in the UK.  We’ll stop collecting responses in just 13 more days — on 19 March.

Site re-design: I incorporated most of the comments made by comrades on what I did so far. Masha, who is a professional graphic designer, is going to suggest a new logo design soon — once we have that, we can go live, first with the English version. The draft site is here.

Campaigns: We launched our Turkey campaign and it’s already up to 8,613 supporters. We closed down the Bahrain and Netherlands FNV campaigns (see separate posts for reports.) Edd and I both did articles about the Turkey campaign for Solidarity and the New Left Project (a website).

Book 1 (Online campaigning): The French edition has been created and is available for purchase. Sales of both editions have now reached 611, with another 43 free copies given out, for a total of 654. We’ve now paid for ‘extended distribution’ meaning that the books (in English and French) will be available in bookshops and from other online retailers, including Amazon Canada.

Book 2 (Global labour movement): Edd and I are working hard on this one, aiming to get it ready by May Day. In addition to what we’re writing, we solicited submissions from a number of comrades and are pleased that we’ll have contributions from ICTUR, Amnesty, the Global Labour Institutes, the TUC and others. See more details here: http://www.labourstart.org/blogs/?p=2818

Internationalization: We’ll have campaigns in Slovak starting this week. All our campaigns have been translated into Esperanto and our translation group in that language now has 8 members. I’ve contributed an article (an interview, of sorts) for an Austrian Esperanto magazine about LabourStart. We’ll have a Korean interface for our news later today.

Fundraising: We now have a venue and date for our London May Day fundraiser – May 4th, 19:30 at the Bread and Roses pub.  Two months before the event, 77 people say they are coming or may be coming.

Public speeches: I spoke at the Unison Wales Women’s Development Weekend in Swansea on Saturday to an audience of about 26; I sold all 10 of the online campaigning books I brought with me. Next Wednesday, Edd and I (and Anita Gardner of IndustriALL) will be on a panel at the e-Campaigning Forum in Oxford. On March 31st, I’ve been invited to speak at a fringe meeting of the annual conference in Bournemouth of the teachers union NASUWT. In addition, Napo – the probation officers union – has asked me to run a workshop on social media.

Social Networks: We now have a page on Google+ which, according to our survey, is widely used by trade unionists.

App for smartphones and tablets: I’m completing one this week for the IUF and when done, I’ll know how to do the one for LabourStart.

I’ve made the following changes – as you all suggested – to the new version of the website today:

• The site slogan is once again below the logo.
• Global news stories have a new title (not ‘breaking news’) and have been highlighted with a red border.
• The additional news stories line for each country has been bold-faced.
• The bottom menu bar includes links to correspondent login, applying to become a correspondent, and join the mailing list (this was already there).
• The icons for emailing us and the various social networks have been moved further down the page.
• The unnecessary ‘photo of the day/week’ header has been removed.  This would have caused confusion as we were never sure how often we updated this and we shouldn’t commit.

There is still more to do – making sure that everything that was accessible from the previous home page is also accessible here (e.g., newswires) and making sure this will work in other languages — taking into account that there significant differences between how the different languages work.  Masha has also offered to come up with a new logo later this week.  But we’re getting close, I think.

P.S. “The shock of the new” is a great title – I lifted it from here.

Thanks for all your comments on my previous post – this has been a good discussion and it should continue. Let me comment on some – not all – of the things that have been raised so far.

The logo: Some of you like the new one, some like the old one, some want a new one. Masha has offered to create one – let’s see what she comes up with. We’ll also need a square version of the logo (maybe just the letters LS) for Facebook and elsewhere.

Slogan: This appears at the moment above the languages, but I will move it to below the logo, as before.

Making the middle column more prominent: I agree it would be a good idea to focus attention on the main news headlines – but if we make this column wider, it also becomes shorter – leaving a lot of white space underneath. It also means the photos in the left and right columns become smaller. We could try a two-column format, or other ways to draw attention to this column. Let’s try out a few things.

Non-English versions: The English language version is quite different from most of the other languages (French comes close) and obviously the new design will not introduce radical changes into how the other languages work. If they don’t have a top priority news story like English, then this part of the site obviously won’t exist.

Labelling the columns: ‘Breaking news’ is not a good title – this is actually our ‘Top global news’.

Highlighting additional news stories from a country: We can bold face and change colour for this so people can see more clearly that there’s a lot more news for this country.

Missing menu bar: There will be one, but the bottom of the page, not on the left or right columns. This is where we can put a number of the most important links — for example:

• Correspondent sign-in on front page: This will appear somewhere, but probably not at the top of the page. (On the current home page, it’s buried in the mess of links on the left side.)
• Invitation to become new correspondents: Our experience shows that very few people click on this — we tend to get new correspondents because we ask people to sign up after they’ve submitted news. Nevertheless, we can add a link in the bottom menu.
• Newsletter signup: Our experience has been that very, very few people join our mailing list because of a link or a form on our home page; they nearly all come via the campaigns. But I can include a link with some other essential ones.

A WordPress theme?: This has been raised before by Andy and it’s not really appropriate, in my view. WordPress is a content management system – an excellent one which I have used many times to create union websites. (It’s even the system used for this blog.) But we don’t need a content management system — we already have one. In fact, we have several, all purpose-built for us. What we need is an attractive framework and while WordPress Themes offer these, it’s over-kill. There also many HTML themes available which we can use.

Here’s what our website looks like today:

And here’s the new design, largely completed:

You can view the old home page here and the new one here.

Some things to note about the new design and why I believe it is a huge improvement over the existing design (which is not to say that it is perfect):

• There is considerably more white space for a much less cluttered look.
• More prominence is given to images (photo of the day, campaign photo).
• There’s a much reduced colour palette (no more pinks, blues, oranges, etc.) and single font for the whole page.
• The technology back-end of the page is largely future-proof, as it was written in HTML 5, uses CSS and is based on PHP – it’s completely modular and it will be relatively easy to base all the languages on this model.
• We’ve de-cluttered — there’s far less happening on the front page, and nearly all the links will now be moved to other pages.  The key stuff – news, campaigns, labour history and photo – are the only things staying on the front page.
• Yes, there’s a new logo too.  For the first time since 1998.

We’re not going live with this just yet — let’s have a discussion here, in the comments, before we do anything rash.

I know that I’m taking a risk with all this, as people have very different tastes and some of you will think this looks horrible while others think it looks great.  What I’m looking for is constructive criticism — things that you’d like dropped, improved, added, displayed differently, and so on.

Annual survey of trade union use of the net: This went live in English and French editions about 24 hours ago.  So far, there have been 271 responses.  Last year we got 2,954 over the course of a month, and the year before that, 1,336.

Site re-design: Work has resumed on this and significant progress made.  We’ll have a more attractive site to show in a few days.  For those of you desperate to see the work-in-progress, email me and I’ll tell you where to look.

Campaigns:

• New campaigns: We’re launching two new campaigns this week specifically for Canada (on behalf of COPE) and the UK (on behalf of RMT).
• Viewing campaign supporters: Some time ago we made it so that you needed a password to view the list of campaign supporters.  The problem was, you needed to embed that password in the URL.  This is now user-friendly; you can key in the password directly onto the page, in a form.
• Campaigns landing page: This now works in French – modeled on the English version.  We’ll eventually have this working for all languages.
• New languages for campaigns and mailing lists: We now have a significant mailing list for Tagalog (191 addresses).  Our Czech friends have completed translations so we now have a couple of campaigns and have done a mailing in Czech (95 subscribers).  We  have three volunteers signed up to help coordinate translations of our campaigns into Esperanto; they’ve formed a Google Group to share the effort.

Books:

• Book 1: The Kindle edition of our book (Campaigning Online and Winning)  is now live and has been promoted.  Sales of the paperback edition are now well above 500.  We’re waiting for the French and German translations.  We’ve essentially run out of the 100 copies we bought for the office, and have ordered – and received – 100 more. A review is appearing in the next edition of Labor Notes, in the USA.
• Book 2: Edd and I are in the advanced stages of planning for this one — more details very soon.
• Book 3: I completed and submitted my manuscript to UCS 12 days ago — waiting to hear from them what else they need, and a schedule.  The working title is Making Unions Stronger – Using the Internet Better, but this will change.

News database:

• Countries list for news database: There were several versions of this — you could, for example, add a story for a new country such as “South Sudan”, and that country was one of the options, but that name didn’t appear in the list of countries on the front page of LabourStart.  This has now been fixed — both scripts are now reading from the same file.
• Languages for posting news: While it was possible to post to LabourStart in some 50 languages, we have only about 30 translated front pages — so if you posted a news story in, say, Urdu, it entered the database and would have appeared if you searched for news in all languages — but was not tagged in our database with any specific language.  This has now been fixed, and every story in the database from now on is tagged with a language code.
• Newswires for all 50 US states: We now have this — previously we had for fewer than a dozen.  Now we have to think about how to publicize this – it could be useful for local unions, state federations, and so on.

Fundraising:

• Fundraising: I wrote to every global union federation last week; only two have responded, one with a promise to donate more than last year.
• Fundraising evening in London: We’re making plans to hold this on 27 April – details coming soon.

Book: We completed our campaigns book and published it, and publicized it today.

Campaigns: We closed the Guatemala campaign two weeks ago – still waiting for a report on how things turned out.  The Zimbabwe campaign was closed ten days ago.  The Histadrut has asked us about doing a campaign in support of striking Pelephone workers in Israel.

Newswires: We located the RSS version of the health & safety newswire for Australia which the ACTU had requested.

ActNOW DIY: Did some work on writing the code for this – moving slowly …

Site overhaul: Did a considerable amount of work on the new-look website for 2013.  Coming soon.

International Union Rights: Sales of subs to this were disappointing – we sold just 34 of them (as of 10 days ago).

Today in Labour History: This is now working fairly well, and displaying on our home page.  We have 4 or so people adding content and will soon go public in an attempt to get more correspondents.

Twitter: We are working to get our Spanish language Twitter feed working again and we’re exploring ways to get all our languages working.

Inactive correspondents: We’re building up a list of all those correspondents who are inactive and are beginning to write to each one individually.

With Christmas nearly upon us, work is beginning to slow down – not taking on any new, major projects (and, I hope, no new campaigns) before the new year.

Successful campaigns book: This is now complete, with an introduction by the IUF’s Ron Oswald.  It runs more than 60 pages and we should be able to submit it to Amazon tomorrow (Wednesday) and should have books in hand by the end of the year.  The working title is Campaigning online – and winning: How LabourStart’s ActNOW campaigns are making unions stronger.

Labour newswires: We’ve now set up and tested labour newswires in JavaScript and RSS for the four nations of the UK – England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.  (This was Edd’s first ‘techie’ job, editing and uploading the files.)  We’ll be promoting these to UK union websites, hoping to grow our base of UK sites using our newswires from 20 to 40.  In the process of doing this, we discovered we had no recent stories from Wales, so we’ve added some and are following up with our Welsh correspondents to make them active.

Today in Labour History: Did more work setting this up; a version now appears on the front page of the website, but this is a very rough draft.   (The PHP version will look much nicer.) We have our first additional volunteer to help (from New Zealand), so we’re now a team of 3, but I hope we’ll begin recruiting others soon.

Book of the month: This month we promoted a subscription to International Union Rights; we earn £8 per sub sold, and as of yesterday morning we’d sold 33, so we’ve made £264,  This is more than we made in the previous four months selling books with UCS.  It is less than I’d hoped (I was hoping for at least 50 sales, maybe 100), but this is still much better than we normally do in a month.

Internationalization of campaigns: Edd reviewed how our campaigns appear in different languages and we found a number of places where English was still appearing.  I wrote to all our translators and we’ve made quite a few fixes in the Spanish, French, Norwegian, Indonesia, Vietnamese, and Chinese versions of campaigns.

New correspondents: We’ve added several new ones, including two more from Taiwan, our first active correspondent in the Bulgarian language for some time, and more.

Facebook: I wrote to key correspondents about doing additional versions beyond our English, French and Turkish pages.  Some interest has been shown in creating Indonesian and Chinese pages.

New site design: I spent several hours crafting a new front page for English (which could be the template for other languages).  It’s three columns wide, contains many more images, has a larger font, and features a much simpler navigation.  (That’s a screen shot of where we stand now with this, above.)  I hope to have something to show you all in 2013, but the adventurous among you can ask me for the URL so you can see the work-in-progress for yourself.

Closed campaigns: We’ll be closing the Guatemala campaign after three months today.

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.