The new MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) from Mythic Entertainment, Warhammer Age of Reckoning, has been getting some solid praise from the gaming community for getting mediæval on ‘gold farmers’ of late, banning the paid game accounts of people who try to sell the in-game virtual currency for real money. Read the rest of this entry »

Jason over at the newly rejuvenated Communicate or Die has been coming up with some great posts of late - recommended reading even for us on the wrong side of the pond. I liked his distinction today between rough democracy and formal democracy, in trying to explain why unions are hesitant about going ‘open source’ in their involvement of members.

He thinks unions firmly enshrined democratic processes (formal democracy) can sometimes be in danger of making a fundamentally good thing so firmly enshrined that it wears itself into a rut.

Jason sees an older tradition of informal (rough) democracy in America, of ongoing full and frank discussion on an informal basis, which he feels has been sidelined over time in unions and in politics in general: Read the rest of this entry »

LabourStart’s photo group on flickr is a great resource for unions and activists looking to illustrate internationally focused communications work. It’s a group of more than 3,000 mostly Creative Commons licensed photographs of unions at work (mostly marching to and fro with flags to be honest, but that gets better pics than branch meetings I guess). Check it out at flickr.com/groups/union

To promote the group and union activity online in general, they’ve hit upon a great idea of a photo contest, awarding flickr account goodies to the winning photos. If you want to enter a pic, you don’t have long left to do so. Go visit flickr.com/groups/labourphotos now and upload your best shot - good luck!

At Congress 2008 in Brighton, which is turning out as interesting as ever - spending a week in the company of pretty much every element of the UK labour movement.

I spoke at a fringe today on online organising, along with Eric Lee and  APT’s Paul Smith. For the 99.995% of trade unionists who didn’t make it along, here’s part of what I had to say - my 4 predictions on how unions (or at any rate unionists) will be using Web 2.0 in the next couple of years: Read the rest of this entry »

This courtesy of Brian Shaler’s very cute crappy graphs graph-maker.

So… I reckon a number of unions and some membership organisations are having problems in taking up as much of the 2.0 whizziness as they could because we’ve been a bit too used to our organisational structures too long. Read the rest of this entry »

Worrying news out of Italy for us labor-geeks. Davide Barillari, a rep with IBM Italy, and one of the prime movers behind the international web-based linking and virtual world protests of the last year, is concerned his union may be trying to sideline his attempts to evangelise for the transition to a 2.0 organisation, by removing him from international responsibilities through a snap works council election.

He feels so strongly about this that he’s set up a blog (”WE trust in Davide“) and an online petition to give his side of the story. He thinks he’s probably been trying to move the union too far too fast - not to mention irking his employer - and this is the reaction to it. Read the rest of this entry »