Inside LabourStart

I continue doing the migration of most of our short and inactive lists to MailChimp – but am holding off on the biggest (Norwegian, French) until I have the consent of the editors.  Each day I migrate 5 or 6 languages over.

I’ve raised the question with the ITUC and some of the GUFs that we need a popular campaign – one that will get tens of thousands of supporters – in order to grow our list in the way that groups like 38degrees and Avaaz do.  Our campaigns tend to focus on little-known industrial disputes and often the first time anywhere has ever heard of these is when we campaign on them.  From time to time, we should take on more popular causes — and the growth of our mailing lists will mean that the smaller campaigns will benefit enormously.

I’ve posted a page where I intend to document all the campaigns we’ve done over the years — to see who has been asking us (recently, mostly GUFs), which countries are affected, how many people sign up, who the target was, and what the result on the ground was.  I’d personally find this useful when I give talks or write articles about online campaigning, but it will also more generally give us a sense of what we’ve been doing and where we should be going.

I’m in negotiations with an exiled Iraqi trade unionist in the USA — USLAW was circulating an appeal to people to help him out.  I think we’ll pay him something to translate some of our stuff (e.g., campaigns, mailings) into Arabic.

I’ve taken a number of important steps to make our site more secure, which I won’t be publishing here for obvious reasons.  Suffice it to say that the Berkman Center report on how human rights organizations are vulnerable to cyber-attack has influenced me and I had a fairly long to-do list of things which have all now been implemented.  I’m happy to discuss this with any of you by email.

We’ve now done five mailings using MailChimp – 2 to our correspondents and 3 to our English language list.  I’ve only gotten one bit of feedback – someone who noticed and liked the improvement.  No complaints from anyone.

I’m in discussions with Mahesh about getting the Hindi and Bengali editions of LabourStart off the ground – hopefully soon.

I’ve been working on my presentation for the debate on Monday at Oxford on activism vs slacktivism, as well as Thursday’s talk in New Orleans at the UALE conference.

We’ve had a slow flow of nominations for the Labour Video of the Year competition – only 16 nominated so far.  I’ve sent out a reminder to our lists.

We’re also just beginning to collect pre-registrations for our global solidarity conference in Istanbul using Facebook.  At the moment we have 10 saying yes and 12 saying maybe,  for a total of 22.  I expect this to increase in the next few days as we’ve not only mentioned it in our mailings, but have just sent it out to members of all our causes on Facebook.

We are today launching a very big joint GUF campaign in support of trade union rights in Mexico.  The campaign is being launched simultaneously in 7 languages.

The ICEM has given us two campaigns to launch today – but we are holding off for a few days on the publicity blitz.  The campaigns focus on Pakistan and Turkey.

We are very close to a public announcement of our Hindi language edition.

We’ve been holding some email based discussions about the next Labour Video of the Year competition – work will begin on this in March.

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.

• Last week we published our first news story in Tamil.
• We’ve been in touch with our comrades in Tbilisi and have been assured that our Georgian language edition will go live next week.
• We’re expecting the translation into Hindi to be ready in the next few days.
• Our front page in Turkish now includes graphical links to all the country’s national trade union centers as well as two pro-labour NGOs we’ve been working with – and they’ve all been informed of this.  One of the centers (DISK) has discussed ways to cooperate with us.  Meanwhile, a very large number of Turkish trade unionists have signed up to use UnionBook.
• The ITF has called for a global day of action in support of Turkey’s TUMTIS union which is locked in dispute with UPS – we may need to launch a big online campaign in another week or two.
• We have a new newswire – USA labour news stories in Spanish.
• We stopped submissions to our Labour Photo of the Year competition and the judges are currently preparing a shortlist.
• I’ve begun work in earnest on our iPhone/iPad app.
• We’ve asked correspondents to help our comrades in Egypt (at CTUWS) who are looking for books to translate into Arabic – they’ve begun with one that was a LabourStart book of the week.

I’ve chased up with correspondents and translators about our new language editions (Tamil, Georgian, Ukrainian, Serbian and Hindi) none of which have gone live yet.  I’ve noted also a ‘Plan B’ in each case where we continue to get no responses from our comrades.  It’s important that all the languages we list have fresh content and we need to identify people who can help consistently with each one.

Next Friday I’m off to Istanbul to speak at a trade union conference on new media – my second visit to Turkey this year as a guest of the unions.

All our recent campaigns have now been published in Turkish thanks to a team effort lead by a new comrade, Deniz.

The front page of Turkish LabourStart now features our campaigns in that language – it used to show only the English ones.

We asked BWI for permission to shut down the Cambodian construction workers’ campaign, which is now 3 months old.  Of course we’ve asked what the result of the campaign has been so that we can report back to our readers.

I’ve begun intensifying our use of Facebook Causes and have now emailed everyone in our largest cause, the one supporting the jailed Vietnamese union activists.

The campaigns software has been fixed – now when you send off a message and see the page asking you to do more, clicking on the link to show all current campaigns takes you directly to your language (instead of to an old page that showed a bunch of flags and languages).

We launched a second Colombian campaign this week at the request of Justice for Colombia, an NGO backed by the British TUC.  JFC has promised to promote the campaign on their website and to their lists.

I wrote a followup email to the comrade who has agreed to coordinate the team of German volunteer translators as none of our recent campaigns or emailings have gone out in that language – even though we have volunteers ready to do so.

I’ve made a number of suggestions to Andrew regarding work towards our conference in Sydney which is only one year away. These include regular phone calls, a closed group on UnionBook, and following up with our correspondents in the region.

We expect to launch a Finnish version of our campaigns starting with the Nokia one (of course) but have not gotten a correctly formatted version of the file we need yet from the metal workers.

I’ve been invited to speak at two union training events in the UK in the near future on the subject of online campaigning and social networks — one is for the UCU (academics union) in Leeds; the other will be a series of events for TSSA.

This morning we launched our Vietnam campaign in Vietnamese and in Korean as well.

And this afternoon, we were asked by the International Metalworkers Federation to launch a new Foxconn campaign to replace the old one, which we’ve done.  There’s a Facebook cause as well.

Results have begun to come in following up on yesterday’s semi-annual LabourStart fundraising appeal.  So far, 59 donations have come through totalling approximately US $1,800.

Busy day …

Volunteer translators have stepped forward and given us frameworks for LabourStart in Tamil, Georgian and Serbian and we’re waiting for the Ukrainian version as well.

I’m working with the translators and others to make sure that we can begin a steady flow of news stories in these languages — and eventually to do campaigns and mailing lists in them.

Tamil has over 65 million speakers; Serbian has over 8 million; Georgian has over 4 million; and Ukrainian has almost 40 million.

In other words, if we can get these 4 languages up and running with labour news, we’re reaching out to an audience that’s nearly twice the size of the population of the U.K.

Every single one of the current LabourStart campaigns appears in English, French, Russian, Spanish and Italian, and that’s fantastic.  Andy, Masha, David and Andrea have ensured that our readers in those languages have a chance to participate.  We’ve done pretty well with Norwegian and Chinese as well, with the vast majority of campaigns translated promptly by Espen and Lennon.

But there are languages that we have the capacity to campaign in, and have sometimes run campaigns in, but which have recently become dormant.  These are the following:

1. German
2. Dutch
3. Turkish
4. Portuguese
5. Polish
6. Korean
7. Farsi

Taken I’ve written to all those who’ve helped, and others who might help, to try to make sure that we once again have all our campaigns in those languages.

In the German case, we’ve had one of the five current campaigns translated and we have quite a few volunteers ready and willing to do the work.  Today I’ve asked them if one would agree to be the coordinator so that we could sort this out in future without me having to randomly pick one translator each time.

If we get this right, every campaign will appear in 14 languages, and we should plan to expand that to include other key languages in which we already have active news sites, such as Finnish.

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