Inside LabourStart

We’ve got the first 7 people using it and responses so far are positive.  Today I invited 100 times that number — the entire list of LabourStart correspondents — to be our beta-testers.  We have 28 more days to decide if we like this thing …

For the next 30 days we’ll be testing this. If you’re interested in being one of the beta testers, click on the Sign up link in the upper right corner.  To learn more about what’s going on, read this blog post.

I have written to all concerned parties — this campaign has been running now for more than 3 months and should be suspended.

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.

My weekly podcast on Labour and Technology is now live, here.

Sherlock Holmes once told Dr. Watson that “on general principles it is best that I should not leave the country” because “it causes an unhealthy excitement among the criminal classes.”

I’m starting to feel the same way.

Forty-eight hours before my two-week vacation begins and we’re seeing a flood of new campaigns coming into LabourStart.

• The International Transport Workers Federation asked us to campaign in support of 120 sacked workers at UPS Turkey.  The campaign went live in English and French yesterday, and so far 45 people have sent off messages.  Today I sent it off for translation into 10 more languages, sent out a Tweet, wrote to the more than 3,000 people in our LabourStart Facebook group, posted it to the Wire on UnionBook, and made it a top news story.  I plan to publicize it to our lists in tomorrow’s mailing.  Those numbers will shoot up within twenty-four hours.
• Our friends in the UE in the USA have asked us to campaign in support of ongoing disputes in Mexico involving the electrical workers union and workers in Cananea.  We’re hoping to have the texts ready tomorow.
• The Trade Union Congress of the Philippines has been asking for our support for a campaign but we’ve asked them to show some evidence of international support and they’re waiting for a statement from the ITUC Asia Pacific region.  It’s not clear that we’ll have this ready before I leave.

There are other requests in the pipeline as well.  And comrades, it’s August — in the northern hemisphere, most trade unions barely function, as everyone is on holiday (at least in Europe).

Our collective absences from our desks in this period does seem to cause an unhealthy excitement among the criminal classes, er, the bosses.

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 moment we’re running seven campaigns at once — this is quite a lot for us — and they differ wildly in the number of messages sent.  Here are the campaigns, the number of messages sent, and when they were launched — in order of popularity:

• Iran: Farzad Kamangar executed – 6,608 (11.5)
• China: Foxconn suicides – 5,411 (28.5)
• Taiwan: Touch panel workers – 4,043 (21.4)
• Algeria: Union HQ shut down – 2,668 (25.5)
• Iraq: Minister closes union offices – 2,554 (23.7)
• South Africa: Dis-Chem strike – 1,831 (9.6)
• Turkey: Free jailed trade unionists – 1,560 (2.7)

Google gave us some credit to lure us back to using their keyword-based advertising, so we took them up on it.

I ran an ad for UnionBook which was shown 2,363,293 times – though only a tiny fraction of that was searches.  Google also shows ads when people view their emails, etc.

The ad was clicked on 626 times.  The total cost (covered by Google’s credit) was US$137.55.  The keywords which attracted the most interest in our ad were elgg (2.75% of those searching for elgg were interested in UnionBook) and trade union (1.35% of those clicked through).

UnionBook has picked up 95 new members since the beginning of July.

The ad read:

Union member?

Check out UnionBook, the social network for trade unionists.

www.unionbook.org