Labor Education
April 01, 2006
Social Bookmarking (Labor Tech Part 4)
The internet has loads of resources for labor activits, but the chaos of the net sometimes makes specific information hard to find. Try Googling "union." You get 507 million hits. It's enough to make you want to watch TV.
Lately people (including union activists) have been using a new tool called "social bookmarking" to identify and share useful websites. One of the most popular social bookmarking services is called Delicious, and it's free.
Del.icio.us and other social bookmarking services allow registered users to save links to websites in an online library. It's exactly like the Favorites list or Bookmarks folder on your web browser, but stored remotely so you can find it even if you use different computers (as long as all your computers are connected to the internet).
When you save a link, del.icio.us allows you to describe the link with keywords, or "tags." You can use as many tags as you like, and the service keeps track of all your tags so you can search your library. The service also lets you know how other people are tagging a particular link. You can search the entire del.icio.us link library on specific "tags" to see what other people with similar interests are looking at, and you can make combined searches by using a 'plus' sign between tags.
Below we have rigged a javascript that displays the most recent six links tagged with "labor" and "union" (labor + union). As people tag new items with both tags, those links should show up on the list. Just imagine if thousands of union activists used del.icio.us and tagged every useful site "labor" and "union." Very soon we would have a good index of labor online. So go to it!
A word of caution, your del.icio.us library is completely public and visible to all other users of the service. This is a service that only works by sharing information freely. So use it with that in mind.
Links to Del.icio.us tags:
del.icio.us / labor+union / workers+rights / labor+union+blog
Posted by higbie at 06:18 PM | Comments (0)
March 26, 2006
Text Messaging (Labor Tech Part 3)
The newest thing in political organizing is using mobile phones and text messaging to reach supporters and get them to act. During the Roberts and Alito Supreme Court confirmation hearings the People for the American Way set up www.savethecourt.org to coordinate their campaign against the nominees. As part of this, they created a “Mass Immediate Response” system, which sent text messages to supporters urging them to contact members of Congress at crucial moments during the confirmation process.
In the Philippines, cell phone ring tones helped to spark a movement to impeach the country’s president after a recording surfaced in which she appeared to discuss vote rigging. Also, union organizers working in the hostile export sector use cell phone text messaging to alert members and potential members to upcoming meetings, major grievances, and other job actions. The union gathers basic contact information for everyone who comes to meetings, whether or not members, and then uses a free online service called Chikka to distribute text messages from Internet cafés. Most commercial cell phone services in the U.S. allow for similar functions.
Important issues to consider with text messaging include 1) most people consider their cell phones private and do not want unsolicited messages. So you must get people to explicitly opt in to the program. Anything that resembles spam will generate hostility. 2) Messages must be short and useful. The screens are small. They should contain information people want. 3) The text messages should make action easier for your members and supporters.
For more information see the following:
The Politics-to-Go Handbook: A Guide to Using Mobile Technology in Politics (Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet at George Washington University, 2005). Buy it for $20 including shipping at www.ipdi.org/publications.
MobileActive: Cell Phones for Civic Engagement is a global network of activists and campaigners using mobile phones for civic action and engagement.
WinkSite (Wireless Ink) is a service that allows registered users to set up web content that is laid out in a way that makes it readable on cell phones. According to their site, they are “a community-focused microcontent publishing platform designed for personal expression and social networking for those who enjoy a mobile lifestyle.”
Posted by higbie at 08:57 PM | Comments (0)
Blogs for Labor (Labor Tech Part 2)
Web logs (a.k.a., Blogs): Easy Online Publishing
The term blog is a contraction of web log. A blog is a website on which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. Blogs often focus on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news. Some blogs function as online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. Since its appearance in 1995, blogging has emerged as a popular means of communication, affecting public opinion and mass media around the world. (adapted from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLOGhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLOG). The act of writing posts for a blog is known as “blogging,” and a person who writes or contributes to a blog is known as a “blogger.”
The easiest and cheapest way to set up a blog is though the free service called Blogger www.blogger.com, which is owned by Yahoo! It takes about 5 minutes to register and set up a basic blog, and an evening of fiddling to get things just the way you want them. There are several other programs and services for bloggers, but in my experience Blogger is the easiest to start with, and is flexible enough to expand with your needs. Blogger hosts a wide array of blogs: personal diaries and political rants, artistic projects, and organizational blogs. If your local has the financial and technical support, you may want to host your blog on your own computers.
Blogs can work as a central place to post information about your union—in this case they are just a convenient and inexpensive way to have a website. But the potential of blogs to spark discussion and move people to action is more important. Blogs can be a place to foster discussion about issues of concern to union members. They can even invite the public at large to enter a dialogue with unions about policy issues that impact union members lives.
To be a discussion forum, you must enable the comment function. WARNING: if you choose to have comments, you should be ready for negative, and even hostile comments. There are ways to limit malicious comments, and to create a delay so that the blog editor can view comments before they go live. However, you don’t want to make your readers think you are censoring them. This is a sure way to turn them off and create more hostility. During the New York City transit strike last December, the union set up a blog as a back up to their website. For the first several hours of the strike they left the comment function on with the result that they received over 600 comments, many of them extremely hostile. By noon on the first day of the strike, the union turned off the comment function.
Some Examples of Union Blogs
American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE): UnionBlog
American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has a blog dedicated to one issue: the federal law known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). NCLB: Let’s Get It Right
Starbucks Workers Union
Cleveland, Ohio, Central Labor Council hosts a blog written by its executive secretary, John Ryan of the CWA
For more information see…
Sharon R. Pinnock, “Organizing Virtual Environments: National Union Deployment of the Blog and new Cyberstrategies,” WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society 8(June 2005): 457-468. Also at http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/loi/wusa.
Posted by higbie at 04:58 PM | Comments (0)
Open Source and Unions (Labor Tech Part 1)
Open Source Software and Open Access to Information
The commercialization of the Internet has been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, we have many more applications, more content, and better search engines than we did in the recent past. On the other hand, commercialization threatens to undermine the promise of the Internet to deliver inexpensive information to any one within reach of a networked computer.
The single most important thing you can do to cut down on unnecessary commercialization is to use “open source” software whenever possible. In the case of web browsing, there really is no reason to use a commercial program because Mozilla Firefox http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/ is free, and it is probably the best browser out there.
In recent years, large media companies have led the charge to make copyright more restrictive. In general, this benefits stockholders over the public and artists. It means that ever fewer works of art, literature, and commentary enter the “public domain” where they can be freely shared. In an effort to balance out the drive to copyright everything, many are turning to the Creative Commons licensing system, which allows authors, artists, and musicians to tailor their copyright in order balance the needs of audiences for free access to information and their own need to retain control over their creations. For more information see http://creativecommons.org/
Posted by higbie at 04:54 PM | Comments (0)