The union Faceban saga took a new and depressing turn this week, after many people found they were prohibited from sharing a link to the activist site supporting unions’ industrial action on the 30th June – j30strike.org – We’re now contending with Facebook pre-bans!
When they tried to post the link (and later also short link site redirects to the site, and even posts discussing the site), they got a popup message saying the site had been reported and they weren’t able to share it. This persisted for some time before Facebook relented and let the site be shared by users.
This isn’t a new development – vexatious complaints to Facebook (or indeed pretty much any other commercial social network) can be ludicrously powerful. Facebook’s revenue per user is pretty minuscule, so their legions of users can only be serviced on the cheap. A few years back they only had around 100 customer service operatives to moderate tens of millions of active users’ content, and I imagine if the situation’s changed, it’s for the worse. (more…)
Check out the neat-o widget here – though I think you’ll have to sit through a lot of people’s messages before you get to my one – it’s in there, honest!
I’ll be marching on 26th March for an alternative to the Coalition’s plans for fast and deep cuts to public spending. In fact, I’ll most likely be helping steward the event, but if you’re looking out for stewards’ tabards to find me, you might take a while. Event managers suggest a steward for every 50 marchers, which on a turnout over a hundred k will take 2,000 people volunteering to look out for their fellow marchers.
If you’re one such public spirited person, and think you look good in hi-vis, you can find out more about volunteering, and put your name in the ring over at the new March for the Alternative site.
Cory Doctorow has a new young-adult novel out, and it’s something that union organisers and communicators very much need to read.
For The Win meshes together the lives of people working in and around MMORPGS, the massively multiplayer online role-playing games which grow in size and value every year. Set about ten minutes into the future, it shows how these virtual worlds have developed virtual economies, with people who work in them, legally and illegally. (more…)
This will put a smile on your face for Thursday morning! Workers at San Francisco’s Westin St Francis Hotel have been locked in dispute with managment over their contract and healthcare provision, and things have gotten so bad, that they’ve come to the drastic step of calling for a boycott of their own employer until the situation improves.
Here are San Francisco LGBT activist group Havoq & Pride at Work staging a fantastic flashmob in the hotel lobby, aimed at highlighting the boycott to the thousands flocking to SF (and needing a hotel room) for the annual pride march. (more…)
I was thinking today about why trade unions don’t make a bigger deal of Open Source software – not just to use themselves more often, but as a model for the businesses their members work in. We like co-ops well enough, for example, or social enterprises.
I guess there could be an element in some quarters of resistance to the intially strange idea of amateurs voluntarily taking on work that’s been traditionally done by paid staff in formal companies – the same issues we see wherever the internet is perceived to be pitting people’s leisure interests up against the work of professionals. More likey though is that it’s all a bit new to us. I don’t know many unionised coders myself, let alone union Open Source coders. (more…)
People sometimes ask me “John, why should trades unions get involved with Twitter?” No, honest, they really do, my life is *that* exciting at times…
My standard response is that it all depends. The microblogging service Twitter is potentially attractive to unions as it’s something of a liberal and Labour ghetto, and it gets a lot of column inches for being flavour of the moment and making people look modern. However, Twitter is almost a platform in search of a utility, and different people/unions might get very different things out of it, or of course nothing at all, depending on how they naturally want to communicate. (more…)
I’m not too proud of having been a lousy student. I don’t think I ever got an assignment in on time, and really found it a struggle to get much information out of libraries or lectures and into my head. Of course, since leaving uni for the world of work, I’ve found a big sop for my wounded pride in managmenty self awareness tests. It’s all because I’m an activist learner you see (not my fault whatsoever, honest!), and find it awkward to learn something unless I’m actually in the process of trying it at the same time.
We’ve seen a whole bunch more union related blogs over the last year, at all levels of the movement (check out the lists at TIGMOO.co.uk for many of them). But one thing I’ve noticed has impressed me in particular, and that’s the first attempts at cleverly using other people’s blogs to talk to members. I’m not talking about the Gen Sec posts that pop up on Comment Is Free every now and then, or the more mainstream political blogs, but something much closer to unions’ membership – the online trade press. (more…)
Another day, another aggregator. I’m getting quite into union aggregator sites of late, and think there could be something in this cheap and cheerful technology that could really be powerful for unions.
The latest experiment is Union Newswire. It collates and republishes links to union press releases from 19 UK organisations. The idea is to make a one-stop shop for journalists, bloggers or students following developments in unions. Rather than remember to check 19 sites, it gives you a choice of ways to stay up to date with the news you need from each of them, depending on how you want to work – web, email, RSS or Twitter. (more…)
And, inspired by the IBEW social media organising vid, I thought I’d try out Prezi.com’s shiny new beta embed feature to show a presentation on the same lines that I did for UNI Global Union a few months ago.
BTW, I think Prezi has some good potential for union organisers too – a fair sight more compelling than the death-by-Powerpoint you get at many union meetings, and easy for people to use outside the context of the meeting.
Cory Doctorow has a new young-adult novel out, and it’s something that union organisers and communicators very much need to read.
