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Bienvenue sur IWW.org

IWW - Sat, 05/22/2010 - 12:56pm

Vous êtes sur le site officiel des Travailleurs Industriels du Monde. Ici vous trouverez à peu près tout ce dont vous avez besoin pour rejoindre l'IWW et commencer à organiser vos lieux de travail et construire un grand syndicat au sein de votre communauté. La plupart des informations contenues ici traitent des Etats-unis et du Canada, mais nous avons aussi des liens vers d.autres sites IWW gérés ailleurs.

L'IWW est une organisation syndicale pour tous les travailleurs, un syndicat dédié à l'organisation des travailleurs sur leur lieu de travail, dans leurs industries et leurs communautés. Les membres des IWW organisent les travailleurs pour obtenir de meilleures conditions aujourd.hui et construisent pour demain un monde économique démocratique. Nous voulons que nos entreprises fonctionnent au profit des ouvriers et des communautés plutôt que pour une poignée de patrons et leur exécutif.

Nous sommes les Travailleurs Industriels du Monde parce que nous nous organisons industriellement. Ceci signifie que nous organisons tous les travailleurs produisant les mêmes biens ou fournissant les mêmes services dans un syndicat, plutôt que de les diviser par secteurs d.activité, ainsi nous pouvons mettre en commun notre force et faire triompher nos revendications ensemble. Depuis que l'IWW a été fondé en 1905, nous avons apporté des contributions significatives aux combats des travailleurs à travers le monde et nous sommes fiers de notre tradition visant à nous organiser indépendamment de critères sexuels, ethniques et raciaux bien avant que de telles méthodes soient courantes.

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Amazee - Drupal powered social collaboration. A redesign case study.

Drupal - 5 hours 7 min ago
Amazee.com

On September 17, 2008 Amazee released a fully redesigned version of its social collaboration platform. We made this case study for all Drupal developers interested in how the site is being built and what the challenges have been so far.

What is Amazee

Amazee is a platform that channels any kind of activism and provides powerful tools to help project initiators organize, promote, and fund projects of any size with participants from anywhere around the world.

Whether the goal is to assemble a multinational football team or set up a massive number of broadband connections in remote towns in Africa, Amazee is easy to use for any kind of project.

Overview of Amazee features

Amazee provides you with effective tools to promote your project and collaborate with project buddies. You can for example decide upon the degree of openness and publicity of the project, assign different member rights and keep your visitors informed through an easy editable project magazine. The project team can exchange ideas in the discussion section and jointly edit text in the project's writeboard area. Members can upload pictures as well as other files and organize events and to dos in a calendar. Project funding is an important and unique part of Amazee, providing three built-in mechanisms for projects to raise money and ask for further support.

read more

Categories: Technology blogs

Links for 2008-10-05 [del.icio.us]

Echo Ditto - 8 hours 50 min ago
  • A framework for measuring social media
    "Here's a framework for measuring social media: 1. Attention. The amount of traffic to your content for a given period of time. Similar to the standard web metrics of site visits and page/video views. 2. Participation. The extent to which users engage with your content in a channel. Think blog comments, Facebook wall posts, YouTube ratings, or widget interactions. 3. Authority. Ala Technorati, the inbound links to your content - like trackbacks and inbound links to a blog post or sites linking to a YouTube video. 4. Influence. The size of the user base subscribed to your content. For blogs, feed or email subscribers; followers on Twitter or Friendfeed; or fans of your Facebook page."
  • Twelve best practices for online customer communities
    being armed with this information is NOT, however, a license to start yet another niche online social network for your brand
  • Strategies for Making Video Ads Go Viral
    summary: seeding (organic and paid) and syndication; nevermind the quality of the content i guess
  • book: Born Digital - Understanding the first generation of digital natives
    "The first generation of “Digital Natives” – children who were born into and raised in the digital world – are coming of age, and soon our world will be reshaped in their image. Our economy, our politics, our culture and even the shape of our family life will be forever transformed. But who are these Digital Natives?"
  • Woman to Woman, Online
    NYT: "Sites aimed primarily at women, from “mommy blogs” to makeup and fashion sites, grew 35 percent last year — faster than every other category on the Web except politics, according to comScore,
  • Ten Common Objections to Social Media Adoption and How You Can Respond
    from marshall kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb, "It can be hard to convince leadership that working with social media doesn't mean they've been paying you to catch up with friends on Facebook. You've probably heard some of the objections. But there are ways you can respond. Here's a list of common objections, along with suggestions for countering them:"
  • Ten Common Objections to Social Media Adoption and How You Can Respond
Categories: Potpourri

UFT favors large class size!

Edwize - Sun, 10/05/2008 - 7:03pm

Writing in an op-ed piece for The New York Post, current research darling of the Department of Education and university professor William Ouchi, offers this embedded gem:

In New York high schools, the traditional union contract has specified a maximum of 170 students in five classes of 34 students each. So, every semester, teachers must get to know up to 170 adolescents and form a sufficient bond with each one to be able to push them to do their best. Teachers say that’s impossible.

The challenge for principals is to get TSL (that’s “teacher:student load” another example of the way the current crop of corporate educators dehumanize  kids and teachers in the search for bigger and better data tidbits) down to 80 or 90 students per teacher without extra funding. Our research shows that when principals control budgets, they work with teachers and staff to do exactly that.

So now we have large TSL and by implication large classes because of “traditional union contracts.”  Like Sarah Palin, I’d like to laugh if it weren’t so scary.

Ten Common Objections to Social Media Adoption and How You Can Respond

Echo Ditto del.icio.us links - Sun, 10/05/2008 - 6:11pm
from marshall kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb, "It can be hard to convince leadership that working with social media doesn't mean they've been paying you to catch up with friends on Facebook. You've probably heard some of the objections. But there are ways you can respond. Here's a list of common objections, along with suggestions for countering them:"
Categories: Potpourri

Woman to Woman, Online

Echo Ditto del.icio.us links - Sun, 10/05/2008 - 5:49pm
NYT: "Sites aimed primarily at women, from “mommy blogs” to makeup and fashion sites, grew 35 percent last year — faster than every other category on the Web except politics, according to comScore,
Categories: Potpourri

book: Born Digital - Understanding the first generation of digital natives

Echo Ditto del.icio.us links - Sun, 10/05/2008 - 5:16pm
"The first generation of “Digital Natives” – children who were born into and raised in the digital world – are coming of age, and soon our world will be reshaped in their image. Our economy, our politics, our culture and even the shape of our family life will be forever transformed. But who are these Digital Natives?"
Categories: Potpourri

Strategies for Making Video Ads Go Viral

Echo Ditto del.icio.us links - Sun, 10/05/2008 - 5:11pm
summary: seeding (organic and paid) and syndication; nevermind the quality of the content i guess
Categories: Potpourri

Twelve best practices for online customer communities

Echo Ditto del.icio.us links - Sun, 10/05/2008 - 5:08pm
being armed with this information is NOT, however, a license to start yet another niche online social network for your brand
Categories: Potpourri

A framework for measuring social media

Echo Ditto del.icio.us links - Sun, 10/05/2008 - 5:05pm
"Here's a framework for measuring social media: 1. Attention. The amount of traffic to your content for a given period of time. Similar to the standard web metrics of site visits and page/video views. 2. Participation. The extent to which users engage with your content in a channel. Think blog comments, Facebook wall posts, YouTube ratings, or widget interactions. 3. Authority. Ala Technorati, the inbound links to your content - like trackbacks and inbound links to a blog post or sites linking to a YouTube video. 4. Influence. The size of the user base subscribed to your content. For blogs, feed or email subscribers; followers on Twitter or Friendfeed; or fans of your Facebook page."
Categories: Potpourri

Links for 2008-10-04 [del.icio.us]

Echo Ditto - Sun, 10/05/2008 - 1:00am
Categories: Potpourri

New York Times On Obama And Ayers

Edwize - Sat, 10/04/2008 - 9:27pm

Today’s New York Times examines the hard right attempts to smear Barack Obama with the political past of Bill Ayers, and came to the same conclusion that we reached here at Edwize last June:

…the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called “somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.”

…Even some conservatives who know Mr. Obama said that if he was drawn to Ayers-style radicalism, he hid it well.

“I saw no evidence of a radical streak, either overt or covert, when we were together at Harvard Law School,” said Bradford A. Berenson, who worked on the Harvard Law Review with Mr. Obama and who served as associate White House counsel under President Bush. Mr. Berenson, who is backing Mr. McCain, described his fellow student as “a pragmatic liberal” whose moderation frustrated others at the law review whose views were much farther to the left.

Don’t expect the smears to stop before November, especially as the prospects for the McCain campaign appears more and more desperate.

Polling Web 2.0’s Presidential Debate Hubs

Echo Ditto del.icio.us links - Sat, 10/04/2008 - 7:42pm
good summary of the major political buzz monitoring hubs (twitter, Hack the Debate, C-Span Debate Hub, MySpace MyDebates, RealScoop)
Categories: Potpourri

All Politicking is Local: How the Obama Campaign is Using Technology to Change Elections on the Ground

Echo Ditto del.icio.us links - Sat, 10/04/2008 - 6:53pm
Ed Cone's four part series: Part One, The Ground Game: Open Source vs Closed, sets up the big themes. Part Two, Local Area Networks: How the Obama Campaign Works on the Ground, looks at a group of volunteers in small-town North Carolina. Part Three: Connecting the Campaign: How the Democrats Built Their Network, looks at the plumbing and wiring behind the scenes. And Part Four, Going Mobile: Texting and Twittering in the New Ground Game
Categories: Potpourri

Teaching Democratic Citizenship And Freedom Of Political Expression

Edwize - Sat, 10/04/2008 - 1:13pm

As we prepare for our national elections, it is well worth remembering that the highest office in American democracy is not the President, but the citizen. In a democracy, “we the people” – the body of citizens – must rule. Elected officials, including our President, are only our representatives; they exercise the powers we grant to them.

The citizen bears not only rights, but responsibilities. Our vote and our participation in free and fair elections that choose our representatives is not simply the greatest power and right of the citizenry, won by Americans who struggled courageously throughout our history to extend the franchise to all, regardless of class, sex and race. Just as importantly, it is our greatest civic responsibility. The strength and resilience, the purpose and ends, of democracy rests upon the active participation of the citizenry in elections: to the extent that government does not have a clear mandate of the citizenry due to widespread abstention from the electoral process, its authority is greatly diminished. That is the import of Thomas Jefferson’s and John Locke’s famous notion that legitimate government is based on the consent of the governed.

Teachers have a unique and special responsibility in a democracy: we are citizens in our own right, and we are the educators of the next generation of citizens. Properly understood, these two roles are inextricably linked, one to the other. One does not educate youth into democratic citizenship by lecture and dictate. Rather, it is essential that we teachers model good citizenship and that our classrooms embody the fundamental values of free expression, fairness and thoughtful deliberation that define all democratic decision-making, including free elections. Students learn how to be good citizens by actual practicing the skills of citizenship in the classroom and in the school. In so doing, they develop the capacity to think critically and independently and to engage in dialogue and debate on matters political. In this respect, presidential elections are a special “teachable moment,” in which students are unusually motivated and predisposed to engage in the practice of those skills, taking the first steps in critical thought and political debate. At this and other times, a teacher must be a good democratic citizen to be an educator of democratic citizenship.

The First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of political expression and freedom of political association is thus an indispensable foundation of both democratic citizenship and citizenship education in the United States. The will of the people can only be known and exercised when three conditions are met: first, there is a robust and vigorous public debate which presents policy alternatives; second, there is a clear choice between representatives who are pledged to enact those policy alternatives; and third, there is a deliberative process in which the citizenry – as well as the candidates for public office – engage each other. Without freedom of expression and freedom of association, none of this is possible; it is the sine qua non of democracy. This is why the Supreme Court has given the broadest protections, among all constitutional rights, to political expression and association. Similarly, citizenship education in the classroom demands a foundation of free expression and free inquiry.

The founding slogan of the American Federation of Teachers, “Education for Democracy, Democracy for Education,” reflects the preeminent place teacher unionists have always given to democratic citizenship education. We believe that there is a world of difference between such democratic citizenship education and efforts to proselytize students into a particular political or ideological perspective, a practice which we have steadfastly opposed throughout our history. A teacher who engages in political proselytizing, or who treats students differently based on their political views they hold, is a teacher who betrays the trust a democratic society has placed in him or her as an educator of the next generation of citizens.

In breaking with at least a quarter century of its own precedent, the Department of Education announced in this week’s P-Weekly that the First Amendment rights of staff to free political expression should be restricted in schools. “School staff may not wear buttons or apparel in support of a political candidate while in school or during school activities,” principals were told. Further, “the distribution or posting of materials in support of a political candidate in a school building” was prohibited. For as long as I have taught in New York City public schools, through some six presidential elections, four elections for each Senator and twelve elections of members of the House of Representatives, five gubernatorial elections, five mayoral elections and more state and citywide ballot referenda than I can recall, the Board of Education/Department of Education had a very different policy. There was no prohibition of election campaign buttons, and no attempt was made to prevent the UFT from communicating with its members on participation in the electoral process in schools. When educators were at the helm of New York City public schools, they saw no harm, but rather some worthwhile good, in students knowing that their teachers were engaged in the primary right and responsibility of citizenship, participation in the electoral process. Why the DoE chose this moment to establish a new policy limiting free political expression will have to be explained by those who took this unfortunate step, but one thing is clear: those who now occupy Tweed do not understand the fundamental distinction between education into democratic citizenship, modeled by teachers who practice that citizenship, and the inappropriate use of the classroom to proselytize a particular political view or ideology. Their actions can not but have a chilling effect on citizenship education.

It is worth pointing out that, to be consistent here, the DoE would have to prohibit from public schools the numerous newspapers and newsmagazines which are do not simply state a preference for this candidate or that political party, as a political button does, but make as convincing a case as they can that their readers should embrace that same choice. Note that it would be the exceptional school which could afford and provide print media on different sides of an election campaign, especially since the editorial choices of the different publications is not always clear at the outset of a campaign. And remember that many a tabloid journal makes little practical distinction between its editorial stance and its news coverage. But if there is a positive educational purpose in having students read and analyze such media advocacy, in learning how to become a critical consumer of such information, why do we need to protect students from the mere knowledge that a teacher is actively supporting a candidate or a cause? If the DoE would not censor print media during an election campaign, why should it censor such modest political expression as a button on the part of educators?

UFT President Randi Weingarten has made clear that if necessary, the UFT will go to federal court to defend the First Amendment rights of school staff to free political expression in schools. What is at stake is not simply the rights of educators, but a vibrant education into democratic citizenship.

Tech-Savvy Teachers: Apply Within

Edwize - Fri, 10/03/2008 - 5:45pm

Teachers Network, a New York City-based nonprofit education organization with an international scope, is seeking applications for membership in a new initiative, the Teachnet Institute.

From the Teachnet Institute page:

Teachnet, a professional development program for K-12 public school educators, has launched the Institute to create a professional social network for New York City teachers, combining both online and face-to-face communication to foster 21st-century skills for educators. Because so many technology educators have been working in isolation, this Institute will offer opportunities to share ideas, collaborate with like-minded colleagues, and to keep our skills current and innovative.

The Teachnet Institute will be an influential group of educators who will: collaborate with members on technology projects, solutions, and communications; write and publish technology curricula; advocate for the use of technology in education; and, come together as a group for the exchange of innovative ideas. We will also have the opportunity to hear from leaders in the field of educational technology, participate in a global Teachnet blog, and explore collaborations with educators from Teachers Network’s affiliates in the U.S. and Europe. The Teachnet Institute welcomes participation from teachers who are excited by using technology in the classroom, want to extend their skills, and network with other educators to build on their knowledge. We are offering stipends for most aspects of participation in the program.

Go to the Teachnet Institute for more information, and to apply. Application deadline is Nov. 2.

Strange Bedfellows in Colorado

Jonathan Tasini - Fri, 10/03/2008 - 11:23am

   Been traveling since early this morning to Chicago area so this is a bit later. But, read this in The Wall Street Journal on the plane:

In an alliance born in part of fear, corporate executives across Colorado pledged to contribute at least $3 million to help organized labor defeat ballot measures that many in the business community might normally support.

More than 75 chief executives -- including the heads of major companies such as Xcel Energy Inc. and Qwest Communications International Inc. -- agreed to donate money and time to the union cause.

In return, the unions agreed to drop four ballot measures they had backed. Those measure would have, among other things, required companies with at least 20 employees to provide health insurance and allowed injured employees to sue for damages outside the workers' compensation system.

The measures had broad populist appeal and some analysts said they were likely to pass, at enormous expense to businesses.

Under the deal announced Thursday, business leaders will join the Teamsters, the National Education Association and other labor groups to try to defeat three anti-union measures that remain on the November ballot. These include a "right to work" constitutional amendment, backed by an heir to the Coors brewery fortune, that would allow workers in unionized shops to opt out of paying union dues.

   How about 'dem apples?

Categories: Personal blogs

Strange Bedfellows in Colorado

Jonathan Tasini - Fri, 10/03/2008 - 11:23am

   Been traveling since early this morning to Chicago area so this is a bit later. But, read this in The Wall Street Journal on the plane:

In an alliance born in part of fear, corporate executives across Colorado pledged to contribute at least $3 million to help organized labor defeat ballot measures that many in the business community might normally support.

More than 75 chief executives -- including the heads of major companies such as Xcel Energy Inc. and Qwest Communications International Inc. -- agreed to donate money and time to the union cause.

In return, the unions agreed to drop four ballot measures they had backed. Those measure would have, among other things, required companies with at least 20 employees to provide health insurance and allowed injured employees to sue for damages outside the workers' compensation system.

The measures had broad populist appeal and some analysts said they were likely to pass, at enormous expense to businesses.

Under the deal announced Thursday, business leaders will join the Teamsters, the National Education Association and other labor groups to try to defeat three anti-union measures that remain on the November ballot. These include a "right to work" constitutional amendment, backed by an heir to the Coors brewery fortune, that would allow workers in unionized shops to opt out of paying union dues.

   How about 'dem apples?

Categories: Personal blogs

Leadel - A Drupal & Flash intensive site

Drupal - Fri, 10/03/2008 - 10:12am

LEADEL.NET is a video portal and social network, funded by the European Jewish Congress, which revolves around the elements that make social, technological, political and financial leaders tick and thereby encouraging Leadel's viewers to explore what makes them do what they do.

The site focuses on jewish identity and tries to explore the differences which make us as identity bearing human beings unique.
The path LEADEL have taken in inspiring the perseverance of that identity, is to create a website which will appeal to young people and will adhere to their standards of quality, user experience and ease of use.
This was a great chance to take the services module further then we (at linnovate) have ever done before.
We ended up writing 16 custom services and using drupal to organize the site's information and flash as a front end, this comination seems to be the best of both worlds.

The Talk Carousel

The talk carousel is the main visual component in the home page and is used to promote the videos inside.

read more

Categories: Technology blogs
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