Inside LabourStart

• 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.

This is easier to show than to explain.  Here, for example, is our Russia news page. Look at the left side, under ‘CORRESPONDENTS’.  Click on any of the links.

This should work for all countries except the ones that have specially-designed pages (e.g., USA, Canada, UK, Australia).  I’ll work on those next week.

Please note – we’re not exposing anyone’s email addresses here; this will not generate spam in anyone’s mailboxes.

And of course inactive correspondents will not see the messages.

As part of my effort to review all the languages we currently work in, to identify problems and so on, I’ve written software that allows us to see who has posted news in a particular language this year.  Here are some examples:

• Norwegian
• French
• English
• Russian
• Finnish
• Chinese

It’s the largest strike in African history and we need to do all we can to ensure that LabourStart’s coverage is comprehensive and up-to-date.  Andrew and I have posted many articles so far, and today I’ll be writing to our key South African correspondents to ensure that they’re fully involved.  Meanwhile, using UnionBook, Facebook, Twitter and Linked in, I’ve drawn people’s attention to our South African news page.  This short URL is what we should promote: http://tinyurl.com/3a348wa

Some of the things I’ve been working on today —

• Have taken further steps to transfer the domain laborlists.org over to our web server at 1&1 Internet.  As you may recall, we were using this domain name on a US-based server to do our mailings until they decided that we were mailing out too much and we needed to migrate everything over to labourlists.org on 1&1.
• I recorded my weekly podcast on labour and technology, focussing on LabourStart and globalization.  It will go live tomorrow.
• I checked if our search function works on keywords and it does — at least in English. If you search on the term ‘FBU’ you’ll see a news story I posted today that has the term in the keywords field, but not in the title or source of the story.  It was reported to us at our conference that this may not work in some other languages, so we’re doing further checks.
• I looked into our RSS news wire in Russian, which has issues with character encoding.  Trying to fix this now.
• And as usual, I added a number of new subscribers to our mailing lists (people who have supported our campaigns), signed up some new correspondents, answered correspondence, and posted a dozen news stories on the site.

In the course of updating LabourStart news this morning I stumbled across the incredible story of 3,500 miners in Peru standing up to an American-owned company, blockading roads, confronting police and troops, risking their lives to save their jobs.

And it reminded me of how we gather news, and what we do with it, and why LabourStart’s news-gathering is so different from automated news aggregrators like Google News.

First of all, we can use human intelligence to follow a story by first searching on obvious terms like “strike”, but then focussing on the name of the town (La Oroya) and the company (Doe Run).  And we can tell what’s a credible news source (AFP) and choose to lead with that.  And we know to search immediately to see what the relevant global union federation (ICEM) is doing.  And when we see that it doesn’t have anything yet on its website, we can write to them to point this out.

There are already reports of some injuries in La Oroya, which can lead us to escalate our coverage, to try to get statements from other mining unions, to involve NGOs like Amnesty International, and if needed, to launch an online campaign.

These are just some of things that make our news coverage different because we’re activists and trade unionists with experience and knowledge — something that no press clipping service, however sophisticated, can offer.

LabourStart has once again become a key source of breaking news as we gather trade union responses to the tragedy that took place yesterday.

We were the first website to report the reaction of Israeli unions.  We highlighted the response of the International Trade Union Confederation.  We’ve linked to reactions by the global union federations as they come in — including the IFJ and ITF.  We’ve reported on reactions by national trade union centers such as COSATU and the Canadian postal workers.  I encourage all correspondents to continue looking for union reactions and to post these with the names of both countries — Israel and Palestine.

We have a new tool that shows us not only who’s been active today, but adds which correspondents have posted news in any language this month.

It reveals that 89 of our 761 correspondents were active this month, and of those, 20 post on average at least one story every day.

Of those 20 correspondents, at least 8 are expected to attend our conference in July.

I intend to follow up to try identify who are the inactive correspondents and to write to all of them to see if we can help (some will have lost their passwords, or forgotten how to post stories).  I will also encourage the most active correspondents to consider attending the conference.

Here’s a new tool that shows who is posting the news each day on LabourStart.  Interesting to note how few correspondents are active, and who the active ones are.

One of our readers pointed out to me recently that search was not working properly on the UK page.  I found the problem — which also affected the US, Canada and Australia pages — and have now fixed it.  Search is now working correctly on all these sites.