johninnit

Jack Jones died last night, at the age of 96. For those who don’t know the UK labour movement, he was a totem for a great many people – the embodiment of the key virtues of compassion, bravery, integrity, committment and personal modesty.

From his life as Labour Party activist (ward secretary at 15, councillor at 23), through his time with the International Brigades in Spain, his stewardship of the TGWU and work for unity at the highest levels of the labour movement, and his immediate committment on retirement (and for the next 30 years) to activism for pensioners, every step of the way he dedicated himself to social justice and the interests of ordinary people. (more…)

Thanks to AFLCIOnow for a tip on a new US union blog. LaborNerd (no relation) is a nicely digested version of labor gossip & big stories, just right for transatlantic nerds – and finding its way straight onto my RSS reader.

Anyway – this video on union labels is worth the price of admission alone. How times change, and not just the hairdos…

And also good fun for labor nerds this week is Unionblogs.ca, from activist and Drupalster David Empey. He’s done a Canadian version of Tigmoo.co.uk, scanning Canadian union blogs and aggregating into a shared feed. It looks to have a good future – he’s put on 50% syndications in it’s first week. I guess we’ll need an international aggregator aggregator soon – nerds of the world unite – you have nothing to lose but your unwieldy URLs…

A nice and serendipitous link between my last two posts – Having written about ‘Guthrie2.0‘ Jonathan Mann, I stumbled across an older song of his, ‘Interesting Time’ on Blip.fm, and it could have been written for tomorrow’s Put People First G20 march and rally – a slice of pure Guthrism:

“Ours is an interesting time. We’re so close and yet so divided.
The framework has been provided, but we carry too much on our shoulders.
Yes and ours is an interesting time, when we’re running out of water,
and the world is getting hotter, but everyone I know seems colder.
Let’s move, brothers, move, and we’ll all move together,
through our interesting times, we’ll move towards a better future.
Let’s move, brothers, move.”

So have a listen, and I hope I’ll see you in the crowd tomorrow – or at least read your #g20rally tweets at www.putpeoplefirst.org.uk/twitterbuzz
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Jonathan Mann is writing a two minute pop song every day, based on themes suggested by his friends and visitors to his website. He says he’s doing it to keep active and creative whilst he finds himself unemployed at a pretty tricky time to get work. What’s more surprising is that whatever the theme (Battlestar Galactica, LOLcats, Obama, a tour of his house) his tunes are for the most part fantastic, with utterly hummable melodies and witty couplets. Honest reflections on his life, surreal fantasies, and pithy political comment, showing him up as a very rounded, prolific, unpretentious and likeable person. (more…)

Okay – I’ve succumbed to the inexplicable Twitter frenzy that everyone seems to be afflicted by of late, and will be tweeting away at the Put People First G20 march and rally in London this weekend. It could actually be fun to see how well a crowd of activists are able to report live from a big event like this. (more…)

I’ve got a campaign, yay! Well, if this banker-bothering online lark is good enough for John Prescott, I might as well have a punt too. LabourSpace is a neat idea – a kind of Policy Idol contest, with anyone (Labour supporter or no) able to add a campaign and solicit votes for it. They’ve done this before, but this time round it’s much whizzier – a proper network with ways to interact with those who support (or oppose) you, and tools to help you spread the word. The winners get, well nothing really, but that’s hardly the point – senior Labour figures are checking in on it as it progresses, and the chance to demonstrate how popular an idea is in this kind of arena is fun in itself.

I think it has a load of potential for training activists of all stripes, and getting new people excited at the thought of doing something political for a change. Unfortunately the execution is a little sticky – registration is smooth enough, but changing your profile needs moderation, and multiple changes before modding seem to wipe earlier attempts. You can understand why they’re anxious about moderating it, but at the same time it’s a bit stifling. Similarly the widgets are great, but don’t all work for everyone (I have yahoo.co.uk email, so the nifty yahoo.com addy book scooper doesn’t help me). Unfair to gripe though – there are going to be more rounds of it (this one’s nearly over), and the quirks will no doubt get ironed out as it goes.

So, coming late to the scene with only 2 weeks left, I’m going to have a tough time getting my campaign voted up anywhere near the top of the pile. Luckily it’s a bit of a no brainer in the current climate, and an idea that I hope is going to be popular: Minimum tax rates. (more…)

Found this old link “13 reasons your Facebook account will be deleted” by accident, after stumbling across a post by social marketing trainer Mari Smith, who is finding Facebook is rather unsurprisingly mistaking (?) marketers for spammers and kicking them out even faster than they do with activists.

Anyway, Thor Mullen has identified the 13 top reasons why Facebook’s customer service robots would be alerted to your (entirely genuine) networking activities on the service, and either serve you a warning or a faceban. Pretty much what you’d expect in terms of ToS violations and power user traffic peaks, but worth reading before you set foot in a third party social network to spread an activist message. (more…)

I’m going on the Put People First march on 28 March in London. Scores of unions, NGOs, faith groups, uncle tom cobbleys and all will be converging on Hyde Park ahead of the G20 London Summit.

Should be big enough a coalition to send a real signal to the G20 as they prepare to meet. But there’s stuff to be done before then if we’re to turn out enough people. Please do add your own message at putpeoplefirst.org.uk or on this here widget, and then get spreading the word with all the lovely social network tools on the campaign site.

So we’re all familiar with the idea of the digital divide. In context of unions, around 70% of UK union members have access at home or work – most (but not all by any stretch) on broadband. This number is growing slightly all the time, but there’s a big chunk of the population that don’t have access to the intertubes, and hence to all the empowering and enfranchising goodness that flows from them.

Couple this with a drop off for those on the lowest incomes, and another for those over 60, and you see the danger of abandoning the offline path. Some of those least enfranchised in society are missing out disproportionally in the opportunities that easy access brings with it. (more…)

At a Labour New Media breakfast yesterday, which gave a really interesting insight into how Labour hope to change their campaigning to make the most of the new environment. Also the launch of LabourList, and a chance to witness a broad section of the left blogohemisphere’s ecosystem – which I think is a post in itself.

There was a big distraction (well, enough to distract me) at the event though in the shape of an article from the Guardian, alleging LabourList editor Derek Draper was fudging the origins of his psychotherapy qualifications (studying in Berkeley, but not at Berkeley. David Hencke wrote it up, on a tip off from top right-wing blogger Guido Fawkes. Toddler-induced router damage prevented me from sticking this post up last night, and Roy ‘Splitter’ Greenslade has beaten me to much of the point. (more…)