Inside LabourStart

Over time, more and more of the messages being sent out in support of our campaigns are coming in languages other than English. In our current campaigns, it can be as much as a third of all messages sent. Even if the English messages still outnumber the non-English ones by two-to-one, it’s still significant. There are global unions which campaign in one, or perhaps two or three languages, not necessarily realizing the potential.

If you look at our live review of campaigns broken down by languages, you can see the most recent one (Turkey: Free jailed trade unionists now) has had 5,883 messages sent and of those, 1,865 come from non-English versions of the campaign. The biggest ones are actually quite substantial, with 650 in Turkish and well over 500 in French. I’m going to do a bit of a push now to get additional translations and mailings out. If we can pick up another 135 non-English messages, this will be the first time we’ve ever broken the 2,000 barrier for a campaign.

LabourStart already has the capacity to translate campaigns in nearly 20 languages – but we often get only half of that done.  And there are many, many more languages we could be doing.  I routinely look over our campaigns after a few weeks to see what has been translated so far and what not, and try to follow up with volunteer translators.  I could use some help with this.  Have a look at this new page on our blog.

Global union federations: I spent two days this week at the IUF and discussed, among other things, my participation in their Congress in May.  The IMF has asked us to do a new campaign on Kosovo/Serbia, which we’ll launch today.  The new merged GUFs – IMF, ICEM and ITGLWF, have invited me to attend the founding congress of the new federation, called IndustriALL in Copenhagen in June.  I contacted UNI about the Netherlands cleaners campaign which is now two months old; they want us to continue it for another month. PSI is looking into whether we need to do a Paraguay campaign together. The ITF‘s Auckland campaign was closed – another victory.  See below for how our list reacted to the news.

Other campaigns: I submitted a short article to the left-wing German weekly newspaper Jungle World which, when published, should give a boost to the Matteo Parlati campaign.    I made some small changes to the mycampaigns.cgi script so that it should work better in French and Norwegian (fixed the character encoding of the page).  We have been approached by unions in Canada and South Africa about launching new campaigns.  A discussion is taking place among Turkish unions about another possible campaign there, this time targetting an Apple supplier (they’re not only in China).

Mailing list: I gave Mac Urata access (and instructions) so he can send mailings out in Japanese.  The lists are rapidly approaching 100,000 members; when we cross that threshhold we will be paying another amount each month.

Ukrainian version of LabourStart: Masha is sorting out a translation of the interface and we have a large group of volunteer correspondents in Ukraine ready to go.

Regular tasks: Did the monthly review of LabourStart stats (see below).  Backed up the website, mailing lists and databases, as I do every week.

What I’ve been up to these last five days …

I’ve made serious improvements to the script that shows who is posting news to LabourStart. It now shows the correspondent’s full name and country, and totals for the day and month, making it much more useful I think. And I’ve made this more accessible – but only to correspondents who have logged in, who will see a link to it.

We learn from this that about 91 correspondents have been active in March, and they have collectively posted 4,491 news links to our database — an average of 49 each this month, and an average for all correspondents of nearly 150 news stories per day, every day. At this rate, we’re publishing over 50,000 news stories every year.

Yesterday, I met with Shane Enright, the trade union coordinator for Amnesty International, and we discussed joint work. Today, for example, Shane will be promoting our Iran campaign to the more than 11,000 names on Amnesty’s UK trade union mailing list.

I have begun adding papers submitted by the participants from the Middle East and North Africa to our 2011 conference page. These were sent to us by the Solidarity Center, and are in English, French and Arabic.

I did some initial work on an RSS news feed for Europe at the request of a British trade unionist — but it’s still buggy and needs to be fixed.

I worked on the mycampaigns.cgi script, which shows you which campaigns you’ve signed up and which you’ve missed – on the language editions. There are still character encoding problems which I will fix very soon.

The Hebrew edition of LabourStart needed to be fixed up after years of neglect, so I did such things as add links to all our campaigns in Hebrew, translated the names of countries when we’re displaying news, and made sure that all the text which had been in English (including a link to sign up to the mailing list) is now in Hebrew. I’ve also been posting Hebrew news every day (other correspondents have also posted) and am looking for news in Hebrew that’s not only from Israel — which is not easy to do. (Israeli media are, understandably, focussed almost entirely on domestic and regional news.)

I followed up with the Education International on the Bahrain campaign, which has been running for two months and is considerably less successful (in terms of support) than the Iran campaign. I always do these follow-ups two months after a campaign is launched.

I completed the publicity for the ITF’s New Zealand port lockout campaign which at one point looked like it was heading for 10,000 supporters, but has since slowed down and as of this morning has only 6,834 supporters.

I intensified efforts to continue building our largest campaign ever – the one in support of Abdolreza Ghanbari in Iran — which has now reached 15,883, growth of less than 1,000 in the last week. I hope that the Amnesty mailing today (see above) will make a difference.

I discovered that LabourStart is blocked in Iran, and was curious to see which other sites were blocked — and which were not. See the results here.

Thanks to the help of the Solidarity Center, we’ve now got several things translated into Arabic which will make it easier for Arabic speaking trade unionists to be LabourStart correspondents.

At the moment we have 7 correspondents whose primary language is Arabic (from Palestine, Morocco, Bahrain, Egypt and Lebanon) and I’ve asked them to check out our implementation of an Arabic-language interface for entering news.  (This already works in French and Russian, as well as English of course.)

We also have the text of the welcome message which I send out to all new correspondents — I’ll use this the next time we get an application to be a correspondent from an Arabic speaking country.

Finally, we have a translation of the page where new correspondents sign up – but I need some help getting that one ready …

Not only do we now have campaigns in Japanese, and regular mailings in Japanese (both thanks to Mac Urata) but we now also, apparently, have a news page on LabourNetJapan.

Thanks to the help of Mac Urata at the ITF, we finally have campaigns – and a 122-strong mailing list – in Japanese.

We will begin outreach this week to Japanese trade unionists.

I don’t have to tell you all how important this is and how much we appreciate Mac’s help.

It’s been a busy day …

• All recent supporters of our campaigns have now been added to our mailing lists on MailChimp – we’re seeing signficant growth for the German list, which indicates that our campaigns are now being promoted there by at least one union.
• The mass mailing regarding our Egypt campaign has gone out for translation and we’ve gotten translations back already in at least two languages.
• I’ve done further work on our Wikipedia entry, including trying to create an entry for UnionBook but am encountering some resistance there.
• I’ve written to comrades in Georgia about getting a Georgian language version of our campaigns up – particularly the current Georgian one.  Am awaiting their reply.
• Mac Urata at the ITF has agreed to help us get a Japanese version of the campaigns up and running.
• On UnionBook, I’ve managed to sort comments in Groups in reverse date order – something which people have asked for.
• I’ve begun the process of creating a secure directory (URLs would begin with https://) on our site – this is needed if we use Facebook for some pages, which has been done for our French version.
• It’s been suggested that we could get an article about LabourStart published in a left-wing Esperanto magazine; I’ve asked one of our correspondents who speaks the language to take care of this.
• Using a service called Conduit Mobile I’ve been doing further work on a small, simple UnionBook app for mobile devices.
• I did extensive work on our newswires today, including getting the French RSS feed to work properly, reviewing the ActNOW RSS feed in French and Norwegian (now fixed), the Health and Safety wire in French (seems OK), and tweaking our new French language newswire for North Africa.  In addition I completed work on migrating all the regional newswires over to our new database – finally.

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:

Thanks to our new translator, Qassim – http://www.labourstart.org/cgi-bin/solidarityforever/show_campaign.cgi?c=907

The little green flag is actually this.