UnionBook: A new home for online activism
UnionBook is a brand new social network, but one specifically for international union activists and supporters.
You probably have accounts already on Facebook, YouTube, flickr and a dozen more, and are wondering why on earth we would need a dedicated service for unions.
Two reasons…
First off, activists can and do get kicked out of commercial social networks. It’s not malice on the part of the networks, but a limitation of their business. They can’t ever hope to provide customer service to all their millions of users, given they make so little revenue from each one. This means people get kicked out by automatic moderation bots, because their flurry of activity around a campaign makes them look like a potential spammer. They get kicked out by harassed service staff when even purely vexatious complaints are made about them by people who don’t like their activities, as it’s cheaper to lose users than to investigate whether a complaint is well founded.
So, you can put a lot of effort into organising a campaign on a commercial social network, but you’re building it on sand, which can give way at any time and dump all your work, materials and contacts in the briny.
Second, building a campaign on a service like Facebook is tricky. Union campaigns aren’t tied in to a common theme, so activists can’t find new campaigns that might interest them so easily by browsing. You build a group or page, and then when the campaign moves on, have to build another and start getting your audience together again. This wastes time and effort.
Social networks offer union activists two things. A powerful suite of free organising tools, and a marketing opportunity to reach out to millions of potential supporters through their friends.
So UnionBook is a way of giving activists the first of those things. It’s run by LabourStart (for which read Eric “The Godfather” Lee) and based on open source social network system elgg.org. So far it provides public blogs for anyone who wants one, groups (public or private) for your organsations or campaigns, which include discussion forums, document sharing, and profiles with messaging and friend networks. These are some great free tools that should be really helpful to activists looking to collaborate online.
I’m not being hard on it to say that it won’t ever be able to do the second thing. The only people who will want to join will be union activists. There are a lot of us out there in the UK (around a quarter of a million reps for starters), and internationally that will run into many millions (over 500 have signed up for UnionBook already and it isn’t even launched until tomorrow), but it’s still a tiny proportion of the user base of mainstream networks.
Unions and campaigners will still need to venture into Facebook, Myspace and their ilk in order to access the larger audiences, but they need to do this with eyes open and without committing so much they’d get stuck if they lost access to it.
But they should also check this out too. Set up a profile and have a play with it. There are interesting people from all over the world there already, and that kind of atmosphere could make for some really great collaboration on projects and campaigns. It’s rough and ready at the moment, but this is a good thing – get in early and help shape what happens to it and how it grows.
And hey – it’s a social network that your gran’s not a member of yet. That beats Facebook any day! Go join now at www.unionbook.org
Tags: grassw00ts, social networking, UnionBook, unions2.0
