Inside LabourStart

We’ve not had a working French language campaigns newswire for weeks (maybe months).  Now fixed – see it here.  Thanks for everyone’s patience with this.

I’ve just set up an online form here that allows us to easily translate our news interface into new languages.  I’ll be testing it out today with the trade unions in Georgia.  If this works, I’ll do the same for our campaigns.

I’ve just returned from a 14-day visit to Georgia which while a vacation also gave me an opportunity to meet with Georgian trade unionists.

I had three meetings in the Tbilisi headquarters of the 250,000 member Georgian Trade Union Confederation (GTUC).  The first two were with leading figures of the union and lasted some four hours.  We discussed among other things the GTUC designating a correspondent; the launch of LabourStart in the Georgian language; the translation of campaigns into Georgian; the launch of a Georgian language mailing lists; and the possible launch of campaigns on behalf of the GTUC where appropriate.  The third and final meeting was with the executive of the newly formed journalists union where I made a presentation and took questions.  The local representative of the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center took part in the last of these.

When LabourStart began having correspondents, they all knew English.  In fact, at the beginning the only way to become a correspondent was by emailing me, and those emails were all in English.  But now as we approach having 1,000 correspondents, we are beginning to run into some whose English is not very good, or non-existent. And we welcome those comrades to join us — which means that putting news onto LabourStart has to work in languages other than English.

We sorted this out a couple of years ago with French (thanks to Andy) and now we’ve had a request from Masha to do the same for Russian, which we’ve set up today and are now testing.

Basically, doing this involves two things —

1. Tagging correspondents with a specific language (e.g., French)
2. When such a correspondent logs in to add news, they see texts drawn from a file called lsxx.txt where the “xx” is the two letter code for their language (e.g., fr is French).  Nearly all the correspondents today are using the lsen.txt, which is in English — and this is the file that needs to be translated into additional languages for this to work.

We should be planning to do this for all the languages LabourStart appears in, which will allow us to recruit correspondents to work in a much wider range of languages.

At the LabourStart correspondents meeting last Sunday in Hamilton, someone suggested we look into BuddyPress as an alternative to Elgg.  It looks interesting, but I’m not convinced we have good reason to migrate (even if we can migrate).  So I’ve put it out there via UnionBook, Facebook, Twitter, etc and will see if someone thinks this is a great idea and can make a compelling case for it.

I closed down the Iraq oil workers campaign in all languages – it had been running for more than 3 months.

I’ve setup the Serbian edition of LabourStart, and am currently working with a comrade there to get it off the ground.

Last Friday I recorded my sixth podcast, this time on the subject of hashtags and how they were used at the LabourStart conference.  As of this afternoon, 376 people have downloaded it and listened to it.  I also wrote up an account of the conference and posted it to my blog.  Then I updated the conference page to include links to my article and the podcast relating to it.

I sent out mass mailing promoting our book of the month, my podcast, two articles about the conference and our ActNOW newswire.  As a result of this, we sold a few books and got a couple more sites to adopt our newwire.

Well, that was pretty amazing.

I’ll be publishing a lot of material about the conference in the next few days on the conference website itself – http://www.labourstart.org/2010

Meanwhile, today I’ll add some odds and ends about stuff I’m doing as I do it.

UnionBook: Just launched a $150 Google adwords campaign — this money is a gift from Google, so we should use it.  UnionBook has been growing slowly but surely over the last few weeks and this may give it a boost.  Also publicized UnionBook in my daily wire post/tweet/Facebook update.

Book of the month: We’re promoting this starting today.

Campaigns: Have asked permission to close down the Iraqi oil unions campaign, which has been running for more than three months.

Internationalization: We have a volunteer in Serbia who is keen to help us get our Serbian language edition off the ground; today I sent him the file for translation.

Conference followup: I’ve added links to articles about the conference, videos, photos and Tweets here.  Also removed the ads for the conference from the front page of LabourStart and UnionBook, and from the LabourStart correspondents sign in page.

Now back at my desk, our conference only 11 days away, and I’ll post some updates on what I’ve been up to here:

• Closed down the Guyana campaign after more than 3 months, at the request of the ICEM.  This campaign had 2,685 supporters in the end.
• The Polish language RSS newswire seems to be working again – getting this confirmed.
• We now have a conference poster.

Thanks to the efforts of our friends and comrades we should shortly be launching some of our campaigns in Korean and in Arabic.  As Arabic is estimated to have anywhere between 150 – 250 million native speakers, and Korean to have 60 – 78 million native speakers, these are hugely important developments.  More details coming soon.

Thanks to the help of our comrade Lennon Ying-Dah Wong, General Secretary of the First Commercial Bank Industrial Union (FCBIU) in Taiwan, we are just about to launch the first-ever LabourStart campaigns in Chinese – both simplified and traditional.

You should be able to see them at some point very soon here.

Conference 2010: We’ve got a registration page up, not yet for public consumption.  We also have written to Labor Notes about purchasing a full page ad in their own conference program book.  And we’re making a special effort to attract women trade unionists to our conference, and to fund travel for women from developing countries to attend.

Labour Video of the Year: So far, over 1,300 votes cast in less than two days.

TUC campaign in support of Iraqi teachers: We did a mailing to our 5,000 or so UK subscribers. This boosted support for the campaign from 12 (after 2 weeks in which British unions did little or nothing to promote) to 118.

Guyana campaign: We’ve gotten the green light from ICEM to launch this — should be sometime soon.

New campaign for Mexico: UE and the ICEM have green lighted this as well — we’re waiting for some clarifications before launch.

And this too: “The support of LabourStart was vital to the Green Isle Foods dispute because the parent company, Northern Foods, was largely insulated from the dispute in Ireland in terms of public relations, even though local management said everything discussed in local discussions had to be referred to Leeds for a decision.  The Irish mainstream media showed little interest in the dispute so that we were heavily reliant on alternatives. The fact that so many British trade unionists and consumers sent emails to Northern Foods brought home to the employer that there were consequences to bad behaviour, such as ignoring the Labour Court.  Many thanks, Padraig Yeates on  behalf of the Technical Engineering and Electrical Union.”

Our 25th language? We have a new correspondent in Spain who speaks Basque …