Inside LabourStart

Comrades in Turkey have offered to host the LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference there this year — we are currently in discussions about exactly, when, where and what it will cost.

At Derek’s suggestion, I mailed to a number of our smaller lists to encourage people to take part in our survey of trade  union use of the net, to join our Facebook group, to join UnionBook, and to sign up as correspondents.  Here are the results after three days: Another 149 people filled in the survey; 102 more joined our group on Facebook; 39 signed up to use UnionBook; and 10 volunteered to be LabourStart correspondents.

I attended NetRoots UK last weekend – wasn’t invited to speak, and found only a handful of trade unionists among the hundreds of participants.

At a training session yesterday for activists in the ILO staff union, I showed them traffic statistics for their new website – and we found that every single visitor to the site that day came through a link on LabourStart.  Andrew Casey had posted a link to a news story on their site which was, apparently, being clicked on.

See here.

• 531 people have already answered our survey on trade union use of the net, with the number rising all the time.  You can track the results in real time here.
• The Education International has agreed for us to close down the campaign we launched 3 months ago today.  It has gotten over 2,000 responses but has had little impact on the Colombian government.
• I’ll be attending NetRoots UK tomorrow – a major conference about activist (not specifically trade union) use of the new technology, hosted by the Trades Union Congress in London.
• I’ve been invited to speak in New Orleans in March at the annual conference of UALE, the labor educators organization.
• Our Global Solidarity Conference scheduled to take place in Sydney later this year is going to have to be postponed to 2012 or later; we’re currently exploring whether we can do a 2011 conference somewhere else.
• I’ve stopped podcasting; interest levels were far too low.
• UnionBook picked up more than 20 new members in the last 24 hours and is getting interesting publicity — a great article in Spanish from a Peruvian trade unionist which you can read on the site, plus I’ve been interviewed at length by a reporter from Hurriyet, Turkey’s largest newspaper.

The survey is now live — we’re beginning a soft launch today, with a mass mailing later this week.  Please spread this URL to your lists:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7X728DF

This is an interesting article — I’m currently reading the Harvard report it’s based on and intend to take the necessary steps to protect LabourStart.  I encourage others to read it as well.

And the winning photo of the year for 2010 is …

Here are the totals with the changes since the end of last month in brackets:

Mailing lists – subscribers: 70,783 [+111]
LabourStart’s English language mailing list: 58,918 [-86]

N.B. As I was away from 12.12 through 31.12, the mailing lists have not been updated with participants from our most recent campaigns, nor those who voted in the Labour Photo of the Year competition. These additional numbers will be reflected at the end of January in next month’s report.

Unique visits to the site this month: 551,735 (-1,415)
Page views this month: 1,937,210 (+481,370)

Popular language home pages (last month in brackets):

* English 41,748 (47,870)
* Norwegian 6,768 (6,959)
* French 4,676 (4,583)
* Finnish 2,069 (2,456)
* Russian 1,605 (2,125)
* Polish 1.833 (1,838)
* Dutch 1,280 (1,414)
* Italian 843 (1,122)

UnionBook 2.0 – members: 2,805 [+322]
Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 3,930 [+43]
Twitter – followers: 2,790 [+103]
Correspondents: 828 [+3]
Union group on Flickr: 593 [+1]
LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 237 [no change]

Some highlights from the mailing lists — the other large groups are:

Norwegian 2,724 [-7]
French 2,348 [-1]
Spanish 1,267 [-1]
German 840 [+36]
Italian 529 [-2]
Russian 486 [no change]
Turkish 490 [+5]
Polish 302 [no change]
Portuguese 238 [no change]
Chinese 243 [no change]
Dutch 233 [+1]
Swedish 227 [-1]
Danish 159 [no change]

Screenshot of the five choices.

We’ve got 5 great photos this year – thanks to Gretchen Donart, Mac Urata and David Bacon for once again volunteering to select the shortlist.

Now voting begins – check out the photos and vote here.

• 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.

This is easier to show than to explain.  Here, for example, is our Russia news page. Look at the left side, under ‘CORRESPONDENTS’.  Click on any of the links.

This should work for all countries except the ones that have specially-designed pages (e.g., USA, Canada, UK, Australia).  I’ll work on those next week.

Please note – we’re not exposing anyone’s email addresses here; this will not generate spam in anyone’s mailboxes.

And of course inactive correspondents will not see the messages.