Inside LabourStart

We just hit the 400 members mark, thanks in large part to our first, but likely not last, Labour Photo of the Year Contest.

Just as importantly, we now have 3,701 photos in the group, the latest being a shot of Kamal Abu Eita announcing the formation of the Independent General Union of the Real Estate Tax Collectors in Egypt.  I’m mentioning this because this photo illustrates (pardon the play on words) the geographical diversity of the subjects of the photos in the group.  Unlike much of what’s on Flickr, our group isn’t quite so focussed on the global north.

If you haven’t already visited the group, do so at:

http://flickr.com/groups/union/

In a seminar I recently attended on the subject of online campaigning, I heard a bit about the notion of power users, of a core group of supporters who can be relied upon to participate in many more campaigns than the average.

Some time ago I prepared a script that would show us who these people were, and have now updated it.

Basically, we have 205 individuals who participate in every single campaign we launch without exception.  We need to find ways to make the best use of this information and to cultivate this group.  Any ideas?

Barely 6 days into our ‘soft launch’ – we haven’t told our 60,000-strong mailing list yet – and we have 300 confirmed users tonight.  They have created no fewer than 34 groups – with some great ideas among them.

I originally expected we’d get around 10% of the 2,500 people in our LabourStart Facebook group as well as our correspondents to sign up, so 250 would have been good for the first stage.  It’s becoming increasingly clear that we’ll have 500 signed up users even before we go public in January.

In fact, if all goes as I hope, we’ll have ten times as many users as we have now by the end of next month – over 3,000 users and probably a couple of hundred groups.  Wow.

The Janos campaign has been closed after more than 3 months.  This has been one of our smaller campaigns, with a total in five languages of under 1,000 messages sent.  We’ve been told by the UE, which asked us to launch the campaign in August, to suspend the campaign and have been thanked by the union in Mexico.  “Unfortunately, there is nothing to report publicly at this point,” we’ve been told.

This image now appears on the front page of LabourStart in English only — it links to m.labourstart.org

All the other languages are now ready to go — see, for example, Spanish and French.  We simply need to decide how to link to these on those language home pages.

So far, our readers have made 267 nominations.  If you wish to nominate a site or two yourselves, please click here.

Two hundred nominations for the Labour Website of the Year and one hundred new members of UnionBook following our soft launch.  Good morning, LabourStart.

I’ve written to all members of the LabourStart group on Facebook – and to the ‘Free the Blackadder One’ group as well, and to all LabourStart correspondents.  I’ve also posted to the Wall of a number of Facebook groups I belong to.  Within minutes, the number of active users on UnionBook has jumped.  I’ll be leaving soon, but it will be interesting to see how many sign up in the first day … More on my UnionBook blog.

We’ve asked our readers to nominate their favorite union websites – and they’re doing so at the rate of one every 60 seconds, for now.  You can view their nominations as they come in here.  At the end of this month we’ll close nominations and open up to LabourStart correspondents the selection of a shortlist.  More details in the new year.

After trialling this blog for a few weeks among the senior correspondents, we’re today inviting all LabourStart correspondents to come for a visit.  Feel free to bookmark this blog (or add it to your favorites) and check it regularly.  Add comments if you’d like.

Please do keep in mind that this is an internal blog for the use of LabourStart’s correspondents and is not aimed at the broader public (though it is not password-protected or anything like that).