Inside LabourStart

Campaigns: Launched a campaign in support of workers at Paul Yu in the Philippines at the request of the Labor Party there (now with 1,209 supporters, in 7 langauges).  Received a request for assistance raising money for strikers from the IMF and am currently following through on this.   Launched campaign in support of striking Stella D’oro workers in New York at the request of the BCTGM, via the IUF (930 supporters in 7 languages).  Launched a campaign in support of South African union shop stewards suspended for calling safety strikes, at the request of the ICEM (with 445 supporters in 3 languages; will be publicized to our list tomorrow).

UnionBook: Integrated The Wire with Twitter, so posts to one are automatically posted to the other.  Continued work on getting Twitter integrated with Facebook as well so that this can be an easy and elegant way to update one’s status across a number of social networks — starting with a post to UnionBook.  Continued work on the mail-to-groups feature which works, but needs to be fully secured against spammers.Added the ability to include any RSS feed, including your blog, in your home page and profile.  There are now 3,147 registered users who have validated their accounts.

Languages: Continued work on problems with conversion of upper case Norwegian characters in our RSS feed — they don’t convert from Unicode to the old Western European character set known as iso-8859-1.  Fixed all the pages displaying our newswires so that the characters now render correctly.

Regional RSS newswires: Sorted out the Caribbean one.

LabourStart Canada: Sorted out ca.labourstart.org to work like oz.labourstart.org.

Global labour calendar: Did quite a bit of work getting this ready for prime time.

Books of the week: Promoted several from UCS including a book of labour quotations and a biography of Eugene V. Debs in June. In this quarter (April – June), 194 orders for books were placed through our UCS affiliated bookshop with sales totalling $7,779 (our share of that, $778, equals £475).  In the previous quarter, only 9 orders had been placed and we sold $746 worth of books (our share of that, $74.60, equals £45).  This is a 1000% increase due to the promotion of books of the week most weeks.  In the same quarter, we also sold 41 copies of Steve Early’s book directly through the publisher, for a total of $1,031.  Our share of that was was $294 (£179).  So our total book sales for the quarter is probably a record for us — $8,810.

Our Twitter feed: Now part of the union Twibe.  We currently have 1,127 followers and automatically post all top news headlines, each new campaign as it is launched, and our book of the week.

August conference: Sorted out with the AFL-CIO a hotel people can stay in at a decent price.  Created a group in Gmail for all those registered so far.  Arranged housing with local trade unionists for some of us.  Details on who is attending and the agenda so far on featured on the conference blog — click on the tab above.

This campaign – “Costa Rica: Solidarity with plantation workers” – has been closed after 3 months.  It attracted 4,217 supporters.  Despite a request for one, we have received no update from Peuples Solidaires about this.

The campaign in support of the Iraqi Teachers Union has been suspended at the request of the union.  As we learned this week, “The Iraqi Teachers Union (ITU) won a legal battle against the Iraqi government on May 7. The landmark ruling against the government decision to setup an official Preparatory Committee with overall authority to take control of the ITU was a symbolic victory. The court ruling stopped the government move to dismiss the ITU democratically elected leadership.” The campaign generated 4,856 messages in English, Norwegian, French, German, Spanish, Dutch and Italian versions.

In addition to Facebook, our readers can now share campaigns on Digg, Delicious, Reddit and StumbleUpon.  I’ve tested this on Digg, where I have an account, but not on the others.  Shouldn’t be a problem, but if others want to test, this is fine.  If you have other social networks or social bookmarking sites we should also offer (MySpace and Twitter strike me as important) let’s add these as well.

I’ll mention this in our Thursday mailing next week – let’s hope this helps make some of our campaigns go viral.

I’ve just added some code that appears on every campaign now and allows our readers with a single click to share the campaign link on Facebook.  I tested it and it works.  Obviously we won’t stop here — like the BBC, we’ll allow this to be used for Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious and other social networking/bookmarking websites.  I strongly encourage each of you to visit our campaigns and click on the link to add to Facebook (make sure you’re logged into Facebook first).

Three months after launching our most recent Iran campaign, we’re suspending it — after consulting with our friends at the International Alliance in Solidarity with the Workers of Iran.  We expect to soon have an update from them on the situation.  Meanwhile, the ITUC and several GUFs have issued a call for a world-wide day of action on 26 June in support of Iranian workers.  We’ve been involved in setting up the website for this event, and have created a special Iranian labour newswire for it.

Steve Early’s new book, which comes out this week, is a terrific collection of articles and essays written by a US trade union activist.  I read it almost in one sitting – it was that good.  And it’s very important, discussing a lot the key issues facing unions not only in the US.  Steve and I have had an email correspondence for several years and I’m delighted that we’re getting the chance to market his book through his publisher, Monthly Review Press.  If we push hard the book can sell quite a few copies and this could also be of substantial benefit to LabourStart.

I’ve published an interview with Steve, created a special page where you can order copies, and have made the interview a top news story on LabourStart.  We’ll also promote as usual through Facebook, UnionBook and Twitter.

We’ve launched a new campaign in support of Compass workers in Algeria, at the request of an independent union there.  It’s now in English and French and the other langauge translators have been requested to get this up in additional languages as well.

This is in addition to the campaign launched in support of PSI, to pressure the Puerto Rican government.

Tomorrow I make a presentation a fringe meeting at the annual conference of PCS, Britain’s civil servants union, on the subject of online campaigning.

I’ve been adding a default language and country to many more correspondents accounts – so far, 181 correspondents have default languages set up.  I wrote a special program to show me which languages and countries a correspondent typically posts to, in order to help decide this.

We’ll be doing a second author interview for Labour’s Online Bookstore this week, to tie in with the promotion of Steve Early’s excellent new book, which we’re selling directly through the publisher.

We did a mailing to our English list 33 hours ago, reaching some 52,000 subscribers.  The results are interesting, I think:

• Only 559 signed up to the IUF campaign – I think in part because there have been several IUF Pakistan campaigns and there’s real “campaign fatigue” and possibly confusion about these.
• Only 22 more people signed up to UnionBook, so we didn’t get that much closer to an interim goal of 3,000 verified users.  This may be because we’ve pitched UnionBook many times before and did not come up with a new and compelling reason to sign up this time.
• On the other hand, our news about a revived Twitter feed got 23 people to subscribe, so we now have over 1,000 Twitter followers.
• Finally, book sales were actually not bad at all — even without an author interview this time, we managed to get 12 orders totalling $421.35 (our share is $42.13 of that).

• 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.