johninnit

A fun seminar at the TUC the other week, on how unions might be able to use blogging to influence public policy debate. Great economic policy blog case studies and tips from Tom of Labour and Capital and Richard of Tax Research, and a side order of demagoguic simplification from Paul Never Trust a Hippy, who very thoughtfully wrote up some well-worth-a-peek notes to share around.

I got my own 5 min waffle in, and this is pretty much what I said. Blogging is a technology (basically the combination of 3 ideas: simple and freely available publishing, loose networks and conversation through comments and links, and simple republishing and syndication via RSS to help people follow a blog),  which lends itself very well to six scenarios that unions might well find themselves in.

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There are now a whopping 100 UK trade union related blogs in the TIGMOO.co.uk blog directory, so I thought I’d do a little analysis of them, and see what it tells us about the state of union blogging. (more…)

The guy in the photo is called Ze Preto (or rather that’s his nickname, it means Joe Black, which is something along the lines of Joe Blogs), and he lives on a subsistence farmstead a very bumpy half hour drive outside the inland market town of Ouricuri in Pernambuco, in North East Brazil.

I met Ze and his family in 2000, whilst I was working for the development charity Oxfam. They were one of the success stories of a project I was visiting, which was helping landless farmers to live a more secure life in the inhospitable climate of the Sertão - the semi-arid region, where long annual droughts can kill off most crops. The project, called Caatinga after the hardy scrub plants of the region, was helping people to implement sustainable technologies like huge underground water butts, which filled in the rainy season and stored vital irrigation and drinking water the rest of the year. (more…)

Iain Dale made a flying visit to Congress today - He doesn’t seem to have been impressed enough to hang around with us. Iain may lack Richard Balfe’s staying power (he’s been lurking in the corridors outside the hall for days now) but it looks like did shift a few copies of his Total Politics Guide to Blogging (as ever a lovely list-fest for blogging trainspotters, with the ‘top’ 200 political blogs listed).

So given the Dale shaped hole in Congress this afternoon, may I present the TIGMOO.co.uk Guide to Blogging - a slender cash-in volume for us union bloggers - with its own little list.

You can download a copy here - you know you want to.

Here’s my post in transatlantic solidarity with Take Back Labor Day’s Labour Day 08 Blogswarm, a US labor bloggers’ attempt to get people thinking about the meaning behind the September 1st holiday.

This is a nice idea, as Labor Day as it stands is a bit of an oddity. Only the US, Canada and New Zealand celebrate it in September. The rest of the world stick with International Workers’ Day on 1 May (May Day), a day more closely identified with the labour movement, which sees big rallies and union events in many European countries.

But the strangest part of this is that the Yanks themselves invented our May Day, and then backed away from partying with us. What the rest of the world is celebrating on May 1 is actually the struggle and great successes of the American labour movement in fighting for the 8-hour working day. (more…)

That’s prettier than anything purporting to categorise me has any right to be. Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds - is just that. It’s a clever little site that interprets documents, or in this case RSS feeds (the one from this here blog), and makes clouds to highlight common themes. Very much fun playing with it, and I’m indebted to Someday I Will Treat You Good for the tip.

Happy to see evidence that, whether my labor-geek interests are going anywhere or not, above all I’m trying

A very interesting project from the European Metalworkers’ Federation (though they’re a bit shy and you wouldn’t know it was them from looking at the site).

The General Motors Workers’ Blog lets workers at General Motors around the world sign up and add their own posts to a central news service of what GM management is up to in each others’ countries.

The idea is to beat divide-and-conquer management and deal more effectively with an employer who is able to move around the globe at will, and play country off against country and plant against plant.

It’s a bit clunky (as most things run by union federations tend to be - it’s always a huge pain co-ordinating people and sites in a second language, and on a limited budget), but I think it’s a pretty good idea, and I’ll be fascinated to see how it goes. My main concern would be that the lack of polish (as opposed to Polish - which is catered for!) and easy explanation of how to work with it may turn off those people who aren’t bloggers already (ie. most people).

Good luck to all the GM bloggers, and let’s hope this is the first of many.