LabourStart for Your Phone

http://m.labourstart.org/ - LabourStart formatted for your mobile phone.

Labour's Global Photo Album

LabourStart's Union group on the photosharing site Flickr.com (that's right, no 'e') just hit the 400 members mark. That means there are 400 trade unionists around the world with photography as a hobby who are posting their work to our group.

At almost the same time we saw (literally) the 3,701st photo posted to 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/

Size Matters - Really

We often use the internet to move large files around. Many of us use mail servers that are limited in their ability to handle those files. Or we just don’t want to have to deal with sending the same large file out, over and over again.

I wouldn’t use it for anything confidential or time-sensitive (just in case), but File Flyer is a free service that allows you to post a file out there in cyberspace. You then give File Flyer a list of e-mail addresses and those folks are told where to go in order to download your file. As far as I can tell there’s no inappropriate use of the provided e-mail addresses.

http://www.fileflyer.com/

CAW Campaign to Save 400,000 Jobs

The CAW has asked LabourStart to run an e-campaign as part of their effort to save 400,000 auto industry related jobs in Canada. 30 seconds (or less if you have participated in one of our past campaigns) is all it takes to send a message to the Prime Minister.

http://www.labourstart.org/cgi-bin/solidarityforever/show_campaign.cgi?c=465

Online Ed Tool

We don’t see enough union education and training online. It should be a natural for us as online education leaps with a single bound many of the obstacles (cost, distance, schedules) traditional union education methods face.

With web-comfort and access rising in the past few years the remaining major obstacles are organizational inertia (ahem!) and clunky yet wildly software.

Moodle intends to change that. It is, of course, open source software. It’s been around since 2002 but is really taking off. There’s a large base of users who are continuously fine-tuning it. Check out Moodle’s blog for an impressive list of organizations using it for online education.

http://moodle.org/

Online Bargaining and Other Surveys

I keep returning to the theme that if members deal with their curling club online, they expect the same accessibility from their union. A key point of contact/communication for most local unions is the setting of bargaining demands and priorities.

Meetings, phone trees and all that remain crucial, in large part because we need to be as interactive and as personal as possible if we’re going to organize in the process, not just get answers to questions. But paper surveys never really offered that opportunity, so they’re easily replaced.

I know of some large local unions that have had their own online survey systems in place for a while. This option is slowing percolating down to smaller and small unions as reasonably-priced commercial services become available. By far the most popular of the commercial services is Survey Monkey: www.surveymonkey.com/.

Better yet, some national unions are starting to offer a service like this. Use it.

And think about other ways in which you can use surveys to organize inside your union.

Free Membership Records Management Software

Newunionism.net is a website recommended here in the past for a bunch of reasons. Here’s another: a free open source membership records management system for unions with less than 5,000 members.

The system is being developed by two Newunionism.org members. Discussions on the site had identified the need for local unions with smallish memberships to have access to an expensive way to manage member records.

MemBrain should be ready for release by the end of the year. The developers are looking for volunteers to test the software before then. If your union has about 5,000 members or less, how'd you like to become a guinea pig in helping them develop the system? In return, you get a fully-registered copy of the membership system and the code access necessary to developing it further. For more information on the MemBrain project, and how it might help you in your work, contact membrain@newunionism.net.

And if you’re not ready to become a beta tester, look for the first wide release of MemBrain in early 2009 at http://www.newunionism.net/.