Inside LabourStart

LabourStart is about to start appearing in Czech.

(Thanks to Marek Canek, our new correspondent in the Czech Republic.)

We launched a major new campaign yesterday. The soft launch (appearing on our home page, on the list of active campaigns on our site, via our ActNOW newswire, through our Tweets, status on UnionBook and Facebook, etc.) generated a grand total of 11 messages sent, including my own.  The difference between this and doing a mass mailing is enormous — so let’s not believe any of the hype about alternatives to email.  At the moment, there are no alternatives to email — this is the only effective way to build online campaigns.

Today I’ve sent the campaign, and a reminder to check our recent English language mailings on Posterous, to our volunteer translators, including our new Italian language translator.  I hope to have this campaign, like the previous one, translated into Russian as well.

Book sales have fallen — the sales of Economics for Everyone were a one-off.  Very few people bought either the Silkwood book or the cartoon book we promoted yesterday.  When we have a poor week, the income is really only pennies and we do have to wonder if it’s worth it for us to appear to be commercial when we’re not really making any money.  There is, of course, the educational value of promoting these books and the help we’re giving to UCS, to keep them going.

I’ll be speaking about LabourStart campaigns at a number of events in the next few weeks, including the South East Region of the Trades Union Congress in London this coming weekend, in Leeds and Manchester in the next few weeks (at TUC events), and at the International Metalworkers Federation communicators conference in Frankfurt next month.

As part of the effort to improve our capacity in other languages, I’ve been working with Andy Funnel to completely translate the interface for adding news in the French language for those correspondents who may not read English.  We’re nearly there — we’re working on the names of countries.  Once this is complete, we can do the same for other key languages, which will open the door to correspondents who do not read English.

I’ve been working on the Labour Newswire Global Network — the list of websites that use our newsfeeds — for the U.K.  I’m finding that a staggering number of sites have simply disappeared.  Unions that have merged into other unions — including some very large ones like the GPMU —  have simply given up on their domain names, which I find extraordinary.  Many local union websites have fallen into disuse, or evaporated into the ether.  In some cases, sites went through re-designs and in the process dropped our newswires.  Of the first 58 websites I’ve gone through, only 12 are active and using our newswires.  If this is true across all countries, then we don’t have 750 sites using our newswires — we are closer to having 150.  This means that we will need to seriously promote the newswires, especially the ActNOW one, to boost responses to our campaigns.

Meanwhile, the response to both our Photo of the Year competition and our Twitter survey have been great — much higher than anticipated.  2,833 votes cast so far in the competition with another 11 days to go (we’re already probably higher than we were last year) and the Twitter survey, with two more days to go, already has had 1,552 responses.  (More than two-thirds of the respondents do not use Twitter, by the way.)

I’ve begun work to revive editions of LabourStart that have gone dormant.

I wrote to all those who have posted to our Creole language edition in the past and got one of them to request a new password. Two new stories appeared on that site this week, so let’s hope it continues.  I have not heard from most of the Creole-speaking correspondents I wrote to.

The Danish edition also needs help — Espen in Norway has been posting all the content.  I’ve suggested that in this case, as we no recently-active correspondents to talk to, that we write to the entire Danish mailing list and encourage them to sign up as correspondents.

LabourStart’s UK news page — which was actually the very first one we created, a decade ago — has been relaunched on the model of the Australian, Canadian and US pages, and can be reached at any of the following URLs:

• http://www.labourstart.org.uk
• http://www.labourstart.org/uk
• http://uk.labourstart.org

In addition, I’ve fixed this and the other three editions to include a fairly prominent link back to global labour news (http://www.labourstart.org).

• We’ve successfully upgraded our web hosting account with 1&1 Internet and now have 10 more MySQL databases we can fill up.
• Some changes to Twitter: we’ve taken some ideas from our Dutch edition, and have changed our Twitter icon from a red fist to a coffee cup, our background from a Korean photo to white, and the link on our home page to a very cute Twittering bird – which now links directly to our Twitter feed, where we have 992 followers.
• A lot more people have been invited to our conference and the list of those attending or invited is updated every day.
• The fundraising concert held in Sheffield earlier this month was not a huge success – but £50 was raised for LabourStart.
• Our French edition is now using an interesting Flickr box to display the photo of the day.
• Our photo of the year continues to appear in print — I just sent a packet containing several recent examples to the photographer.
• Two upcoming events: on 20.5 I’ll be doing a fringe meeting at the PCS union conference in Brighton on the subject of online campaigning.  The following week, I’m in Brussels doing a communicators event for the Education International on the same subject.

As an increasing number of websites now use Unicode for character encoding, we need to begin offering our newswires in this format – which is LabourStart’s default character encoding in any event.  As of this morning, we have Unicode versions of our JavaScript newswire in a dozen languages – Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Danish, German, Spanish, Farsi, French, Hebrew, Spanish, Norwegian and Swedish.  I hope to do all the others by the end of this week.

You’ll now notice PayPal donation buttons on the home pages of LabourStart in a number of languages including English, French, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, and German.  In all cases where this is possible, the PayPal interface is translated into the local language and we’re using the local currency (dollars, Euros, Norwegian kronen).  There are similar buttons with English language interface for the Canadian and UK news pages — using Canadian dollars and British pounds sterling.  In some cases (the English and French home pages, as well as the Canada and UK news pages) we have some additional text other than the donate button — which we should aim to do in all cases.  All this is part of an effort to encourage our readers to help support LabourStart with donations.

Campaigns:

• We’ve asked to close down the Russian campaign after 4 months and 2,415 supporters.
• We are about to launch a new campaign in support of Turkish workers.  Both campaigns came from the International Metalworkers Federation.
• Campaign counter now works on all languages.

News:

• Work has begun on localizing the entry of news links – we’re testing this on French first.  The aim is to have all the input screens work in the local language so we can recruit correspondents who don’t know any English at all.

Book sales:

• We’ve sold 53 copies of the Global Unions, Global Business book, which is not bad.
• The Union Books group has 71 members, making it one of the largest groups on UnionBook.
• We’ve sold $986.55 worth of books at UCS in the first week of April.
• We’re in negotiations with the bookstore of one of the largest unions in Europe, Ver.di, in Berlin and might be able to begin selling German-language union books to German trade union members.
• We’re also talking to an Australian university press about helping to sell one of its titles.

Newswires:

• Did some more work on creating a Unicode version of these for sites which have switched over to Unicode. So far, French and German are working.

Fundraising:

• There will be concert in Sheffield on 2 May the proceeds of which will be donated to LabourStart – more details soon.
• We’re also finishing up the deal with No Sweat Apparel to produce a union-made UnionBook t-shirt.
• We’re following up with possible donations to LabourStart from Unite (UK) and CUPE (Canada).

We now once again have a JavaScript and RSS feed for LabourStart.tv — these are highlighted on the LabourStart.tv page.  I’ve also added the story’s source to the list.

I’ve finally gotten around to testing the Vietnamese language interface for our ActNOW campaigns – it seems to work.

We may be very near the end of the DESA campaign in Turkey — we generated over 5,000 messages.  It seems like the union has won a big victory – more tomorrow.

I’ve fixed our old subscribe-me page — it was still directing some people (hopefully, not many) to our old iContact mailing list.

In the new year, we’ll be selling copies of the TUC-produced book, Hadi Never Died.  This is an opportunity to show our support for our Iraqi comrades and to raise a small amount of money for LabourStart.  I’ve done up the first page promoting this on UnionBook.  In January – on the 4th anniverary of Hadi Saleh’s murder – we’ll promote this to our entire list.

LabourStart’s Wal-Mart page and our newswire have now been fixed and work well with the new database.

We’ve had some problems posting French-language news stories from the ICEM – and the issue may have been solved by changing the URL field in our news links database to Unicode.  Fingers crossed.  Thanks to both Andy and Tom for pointing this out.

The daily counter for our campaigns is now fixed – thanks to Derek for spotting that it wasn’t working.

We’ve done some work on fixing the character encoding for our ActNOW newswire in Norwegian – the problem for the moment is deciding which character encoding most Norwegian union websites use.  Thanks to Espen for spotting the problem.

There was a problem if you clicked on a state/province name on our front page that included a space — e.g., New York.  This has now been fixed.

The form which allows readers to submit a news story didn’t have enough space for long URLs – this has now been fixed.

As we’ve now learned, the ILO’s Solicomm search engine lags behind LabourStart somewhat in terms of languages, but they do have ‘About Solicomm’ pages in a handful of them. Where these exist, we are now linking to them — such as in French.