Inside LabourStart

The first few websites to adopt our local state/province newswires are now live — and I think this looks great.  For example, in the greater Washington, D.C. area Capital Air Lodge 1759 (a part of the International Association of Machinists – IAM) is running our DC newswire on their website. In Toronto, ACTRA, which represents over 15,000 acting, stunt and background professionals, is using our Ontario newswire on their site.  We’ve also had expressions of interest from unions in Illinois, Massachusetts, Kansas and England.  We need to keep promoting this — I think eventually we can have a very large number of local unions using very local newswires.

The Vale campaign is both our newest and our largest active campaign (by far).  There has been a huge surge in support from trade unionists in North America in the last 24 hours.  At present, we have 4,354 supporters for this campaign, as follows:

• English 3,957 (1,555 from Canada alone)
• Norwegian 129
• Portuguese 120
• French 113
• German 18
• Dutch 16
• Russian 1

This number is not currently showing on the campaign page as our web hosting company, 1&1 Internet, has still not fixed the problem of cron (see earlier postings).  I’ll be contacting them again this morning to press them yet again to resolve this issue.

I discovered yesterday when setting up the Illinois labour newswire that it seemed to not be updating.  Then I realized that none of the newswires had been generated since 05:16 London time on Saturday.

I contacted our Internet service provider, 1&1, to complain that “cron” — the system command that instructs it to perform certain tasks at certain times — had obviously stopped working.  I’ve received two emails from 1&1 since then and they’ve not yet solved the problem.  This morning I’ve written to complain how long it is taking them.

I think they need to re-boot the server and I guess they’re reluctant to do this as it will bring down many sites, but they have no choice.

Unfortunately, it’s a Sunday and they work with a smaller staff today and will respond less quickly than we’d like.  The main effect of all this is that our newswires are not being updated — this is bad, but it’s not like our site is down or anything like that.

I’ve just announced to our list that we will offer customized labour newswires for states, provinces and regions in the USA, Canada, UK, Australia, South Africa and India.  The first one was done for our friends in Kansas and you can see it here.  It will be interesting to see if this leads to a greater takeup of the newswires – let’s hope so.

Spam-free at last?

We’ve had a severe problem of spammers for several months now on UnionBook which has inhibited growth and left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.

We’ve tried everything — installing and configuring plugins, calling on the help of the one senior Elgg programmer who’s worked with us before, posted online messages to the Elgg community, written directly to the the authors of the Elgg software, tried to recruit a freelancer who knows Elgg from the elance site, tried to tweak the software ourselves, etc, etc.

Nothing has worked.

However, finally, we have an Elgg programmer on board who is willing to help.  So let’s hope we’re now seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and can get a handle on this problem so that we can move on.

The first 24 hours of the campaign in support of the United Steelworkers (Canada) have been very good — nearly 2,000 messages sent and translations done into French, German and Portuguese.  (The last is very good news — it’s been a long time since we’ve had a campaign in Portuguese.)  Both the union and the global union federation (IMF) are promoting the campaign, and we’ve also got the support of the ICEM on this one.  We’ve got a lot of news stories linked to this, and we’re expecting translations into additional languages today — including, I hope, Russian.

There is already considerable interest in the photo.  For example:

• The Education International wants to use it in their magazine and has asked the photographer for permission.
• The International Metalworkers Federation will use it in an upcoming story — I think on the web.
• Amnesty International wants to use it in their glossy, full colour UK trade union magazine.

In addition, while there have only been 17 comments posted on Flickr since we announced the results (because you have to be signed in to Flickr in order to comment), Asad’s photo has been viewed 10,424 times — which is pretty amazing.

K M Asad's winning photo. "A Bangladeshi boy works in a shipbuilding factory in down town."

We have a winner.  3,203 votes were cast in this year’s Labour Photo of the Year competition, our second ever, and the winner by a huge margin was K M Asad’s photo entitled ‘Manual labor’.

Almost half of those voting chose this photo – to see a full breakdown of votes per photo, go here.

A very big thanks to Mac Urata for coming up with the idea last year and for agreeing to be a judge this year and last (and for translating the page into Japanese), to Derek Blackadder for once again coordinating the effort, to judges Gretchen Donart and David Bacon for once again picking an outstanding shortlist, to all the photographers who submitted entries and to the thousands of our readers who looked at them and chose the best.

It looks like this is going to be an annual event and I think our main task next year is to try to make the whole process, from submission of photo right up through the voting a multilingual one, so that all our readers can take part.  (This may mean no longer relying on Flickr — we’ll need to look into this.)

Of the 3,185 people who voted so far in our photo of the year competition, more than 20% were not on our mailing list but have agreed to be added to it.  The net gain for our English language is 682 new subscribers.

Interestingly, as these were added in four batches of 700 each (there were around 2,800 who agreed to be added to our list, though most were already on it), we could track how many newcomers were in each batch.  The first group was mostly people who were already on our list, but by the time we reached the fourth group, they were nearly 40% people who came to the competition without having already been on our mailing list before.  In other words, the people who vote last in a competition like this are the most valuable to us — they’re the ones who learned about it, and LabourStart, from somewhere else.