Inside LabourStart

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.

This came up during our annual correspondents’ meeting in Istanbul. For years we’ve had the ability to tag news stories as coming from sources that require users to register. For a time, this proved to be unnecessary as most websites were opening up to users without any barriers. But with the increasing use of paywalls – by, for example, the Murdoch papers – increasingly we need to warn readers that if they click on a link, they may be required to register to read the rest of the article. This feature, which worked in an earlier version of LabourStart, has now been restored.

If you posted a news story that had a double quote in the title, e.g. Union calls for “unlimited” strike action, it was likely to save this to our database as Union calls for.

In other words, it would break the line at the first double quote it encountered.

I have now fixed this – it substitutes the single quote, so if you key in Union calls for “unlimited” strike action it will save this to our database and render it is Union calls for ‘unlimited’ strike action.

New country - new possibilities.

There’s a new country in the world – South Sudan (this is their flag).

At the moment we don’t have any correspondents there, and no readers (that we know of), and a quick scan showed no current labour news.

But we’re ready for all of the above, as ‘South Sudan’ is now one of the choices for news stories in our database, and for participants in our online campaigns.

If there are any other countries you know of that we’ve missed, let me know and we’ll fix it.

Meanwhile, we have successfully launched our first campaign in Hebrew — here.  You should see something like this in your browser:

The ITUC has issued its annual report on the violations of trade union rights.   It’s important that we do all we can to promote this — in all our languages and in all countries.  Here are some of the things I’m doing today:

• Promoting this in a LabourStart mass mailing later today
• Posted it to the LabourStart page on Facebook
• Posted it as a tweet – as LabourStart
• Posted it on UnionBook – and then automatically through my personal account to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn

Other correspondents have already made sure it’s a top news story on LabourStart today.

What have you done?

Following up on the call by the Newspaper Guild, a trade union in the United States, LabourStart correspondents are encouraged NOT to link to news stories appearing on the Huffington Post until further notice.

Back at my desk after being away for more than a week … here are some updates:

• There’s now a shortcut to our news about Wisconsin – just go to www.labourstart.org/wisconsin .  I’ve also fixed the page the displays state/provincial news; it had been showing a link to our old mailing lists.
• I’ve written to the CTUWS to ask if they want us to do a campaign opposing the Egyptian government’s plan to ban strikes.
• I spoke last week at the New Orleans conference of the UALE – on a panel on the subject of global solidarity.  My lecture notes are here.  The conference was an opportunity to do some networking and I learned a lot about Wisconsin and other issues that concern the labour movement in the US.
• We’re up to 55 people attending (or possibly attending) our conference in November.
• MailChimp suspended our account last week because one person on one of our lists claimed he never signed up.  I proved to them today that he had, so I hope that later today we will be able to resume mailings.

Campaigns: We were asked by KMU in the Philippines to launch a campaign on behalf of Dole workers; after consulting with colleagues in the field, we agreed to do so and are now awaiting the text.  Meanwhile, we have informed the International Metalworkers Federation that we wish to close down the India Foxconn campaign after three months and are in the process of doing so — we await final instructions from them.  We publicized the IUF’s joint campaign with FLOC regarding the murder of a union organizer in Mexico.

Conference: I’ve drafted a short proposal for the conference, to be held in the fall in Istanbul.  I plan to visit to Turkey at the end of this month to meet with the organizing committee which is being formed there.

Egypt: While the Internet was down, our comrades in the CTUWS were able to phone out short messages which were then transcribed and translated in to English – and sent to us.  We’ve been publicizing our special Egypt news page throughout the week using our mailing lists, social networks, etc.

Languages: We have now been sent the text for a Hindi edition of LabourStart which we hope to launch soon.

• I had  a meeting yesterday with Shane Enright, the trade union coordinator for Amnesty International UK.  We discussed among other things Turkey and Mexico and ways we can continue to work together – including Amnesty’s involvement in the next LabourStart conference.
• Our survey now has 1,300 responses – a big gain over the last week.  I will close it down on Monday and report the results.
• I managed to dilute the size of LabourStart’s news links database.  We are supposed to be restricted to 100 MB of data, though our internet service provider has not made an issue of us going slightly above that.  Nevertheless, I now have a system in place to check once a month and to keep the size of the database under control.
• I’ve created a new newswire – soon to be publicized – in French covering the countries of the Maghreb. In the course of doing so, I found that all our regional newswires are still referencing our old database and need to be fixed.  I will do this next week.
• LabourStart was temporarily offline – even emails to labourstart.org weren’t working – very briefly last week.  Our internet service provider spotted the problem and solved it even before we complained.
• Our new campaigns are picking up support – the Turkey campaign has 1,388 supporters after one day; the Bangladesh campaign has 4,356 supporters after 8 days.