Jan
28
2013
3

Weekly review – 21-28 January 2013

New campaign: We launched a new campaign in support of Korean government workers, whose president is on hunger strike.  This is the first campaign we’ve ever done that’s picked up any supporters at all in Korea, and was quickly translated into that language (among many others).  We’re already over the 5,000 mark and hope for this to turn into a large campaign.

New mailing list system: I have experimenting with Sendy and have to say that so far, am very pleased. It works, it’s cheap, and the tech support has been great.  (This is taking a lot of time, but as it will save us something like £5,000 this year, it will be worth it.)

Book 1: I’m completing the writing this week of Making Unions Stronger – Using the Internet Better, which will be published by UCS this year.

Book 2: Sales continue to go well for Campaigning Online and Winning (473 sold so far) and we’ve had offers to translate into French and German.  We have a Kindle edition of the English version ready, but it needs some tweaking.

New language: Our friends at the KMU in the Philippines have given us a translation of our campaigns framework into Tagalog – spoken by an estimated 28 million people.

Newswires: All the regional newswires are now working.

Coming soon: The third annual survey of trade union use of the net.

 

 

Jan
21
2013
0

Weekly summary – 15-21 January 2013

Campaigns book: Andy is working on a translation into French.  The Kindle edition should go live today.  Sales are now well over 400.  Two parts of the book are about to be reprinted in Social Policy magazine whose editor, Wade Rathke, the founder of ACORN, loved the book.

Campaigns: We launched new campaigns in support of workers in the Philippines and El Salvador.  We closed down the Mexico and China campaigns.

ActNOW DIY: Made a lot of progress on this – hopefully will have something to show before the month is up.

Newswires: We have working newswires in RSS format now for all regions – Europe, Africa, Asia, the Pacific, Central America, the Caribbean, South America and the Middle East.  A number of new unions have signed up to use the newswires – we’ve been writing to local and branch unions, especially in the UK.

Correspondents: Some – a small number – of the inactive ones are coming back asking for passwords.  We’ve now written individually to every inactive correspondent and will gradually begin deleting those who are inactive and don’t respond.  A couple of new correspondents have come on board, from Finland and Canada this week.

Talks: Eric spoke to Southend-on-Sea Labour Party on Saturday; this week, on Thursday, Edd speaks at the Unions 21 event in London.

 

Jan
20
2013
0

Our new book – sales report

At a meeting of the Southend-on-Sea Labour Party yesterday at which I spoke, I sold all ten copies of our book.  I could have sold more if I’d realized that everyone in the room wanted a copy.

Overall sales have been quite good – the book is less than a month old and we’ve already sold 424 copies – an increase of 47 in the last five days.

In addition, we gave away 33 copies to our translators, major donors and journalists, so the total number of copies we’ve distributed so far is 457.

Written by admin in: Publications |
Jan
16
2013
1

Today in Labour History – first example of localization

If you look at LabourStart Canada today, look at the left column.  There’s a new feature – ‘This month in Canadian labour history’.  It shows everything in our database for January, from Canada.  I plan to adapt these feature for other countries and languages once we achieve critical mass — meaning enough stories so that there’s something to show.  I also intend to change the ‘this month’ to ‘today’ once we have stories for every day of the year (or nearly every day).

There are now 11 volunteers posting to this database, which now has 179 records.

Needed: volunteers to add labour history dates from the USA, Australia, the UK, etc — and other languages than English …

Written by admin in: Today in Labour History |
Jan
16
2013
0

China and Mexico campaigns closed

We’ve closed this campaign after three months today.  I’ve asked the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions what effect, if any, the campaign had on the ground.

And we closed this one as well, after just two months. IndustriALL told us that “That campaign did a good job in bringing us together under a joint banner.  On 10 January there was an agreement between the various groups involved to work toward a settlement.  I think it is fair to say that the online petition probably played a contributing factor in that.”

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
Jan
15
2013
0

Fortnightly update – 1-15 January 2013

Public appearances in the UK: We’ll be represented at three upcoming UK-based events.  On 19.1, I’ll be speaking at the Southend Labour Party. On 24.1, Edd will speak at the Unions 21 tech seminar. And on 13-14 March, we’re organizing a panel at the E-Campaigning Forum in Oxford.

Campaigns: We’re about to launch two new ones today – on El Salvador and the Philippines.  These are our first new campaigns in nearly 6 weeks — it has been a very quiet season.  As reported below, we now have the campaigns newswire working correctly in 19 languages, in both JavaScript and RSS versions – please make sure to promote this in your country.

Book: Sales have reached 377.  Let’s all push hard to get that number up to 500 over the next few days.  We were briefly an Amazon.co.uk best-seller, hitting the top 1,000 books they were selling, and reaching number 2 in our category.  A Kindle edition is coming soon, and we’re starting to think about doing another book.  Meanwhile, I expect to complete my book for UCS by the end of January – the working title is  Making Unions Stronger – Using The Internet Better.

Labour Newswire: We’ve pushed our newswires aggressively to UK unions, and it’s bearing fruit.  We had 40 UK sites listed, that dropped down to 20 after Edd removed all the dead wood, and now we’re back up to 28. You can see the up-to-date list of all 302 sites using our newswire here.

Today in Labour History: We now have 11 people adding content to this; almost every day, there is something on our front page in English.   (And more things coming soon.)

Inactive correspondents: Edd has gone through the 500 or so correspondents who’ve not been active, writing individually to each one, and giving support (such as new passwords) where needed.  In a few weeks, we’ll be deleting those who are showing no interest in continuing.

Upcoming global solidarity conferences: I’ve finally heard (today) from a colleague in Germany about the possibility of a conference in Berlin in May 2014; I’ll be following up.  Derek has been in discussions with people in Vancouver about a conference there in late 2014.

Fund-raising: We’ve gotten generous donations from two unions in the USA (United Steelworkers and the Amalgamated Transportation Union) and hoping for more.  We’ve sent out a few copies of the campaigns book to donors who have given £1,000 or more in the last couple of years.

 

Jan
04
2013
0

Campaigns newswires now working in 19 languages, in JavaScript and RSS versions

Well, this is all a bit late, but it all works, has been tested, etc.  Please publicize widely.

Written by admin in: Campaigns,Newswires |
Jan
02
2013
1

LabourStart in Numbers – December 2012

The numbers in brackets are for the previous month. Strong gains are highlighted in bold.

Mailing lists
Total for all lists: 104,515 [104,764]

English: 75,213 [75,686]
French: 5,932 [5,857]
Spanish: 4,356 [4,337]
Italian: 3,879 [3,879]
Turkish: 3,111 [3,112]
German: 2,551 [2,549]
Norwegian: 2,333 [2,328]
Russian: 1,949 [1,948]
Dutch: 781 [740]
Chinese: 629 [553]
Polish: 310 [310]
Portuguese: 243 [243]
Japanese: 209 [ 209]
Hebrew: 208 [207]
Farsi: 201 [201]
Finnish: 186 [186]
Swedish: 185 [186]
Arabic: 184 [183]
Danish: 146 [146]

And just below the radar:

Korean 93 [93]
Indonesian 84 [81]

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 5,389 [5,371]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 5,877 [5,715]
Members of LabourStart group: 4,849 [4,824]
Like LabourStart page (French): 245 [240]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 74 [72]

Twitter followers –
English: 8,115 [7,921]

Union group on Flickr: 718 [712]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,114 [1,100]

Website

Correspondents: 1,049 [1,043]
Site visits: 599,459

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