Who should Communicate or Die reach out to?
If you have ideas for who the Communicate or Die community shold reach out to and encourage to join, please comment here. Also, please indicate if you are willing to do some of the footwork involved in contacting them. This should be a team effort.
Marketing and Outreach
For a start here is a draft copy that CoD members could use to invite people to join this effort, I made some changes and would like comments and or edits before it is used:
Dear Labor and IT supporter,
I wanted to draw your attention a new online community called
"Communicate or Die" at http://www.communicateordie.com. Our mission is
to build a network of labor activists and technology practitioners to discuss and
develop solutions that allow unions to realize the full potential of
Internet technology. Based on what I discovered about you on the web, I
thought you might be interested, hence this e-mail.
We're just starting out. Please register and start commenting and
contributing if you're interested in becoming a member of the
"Communicate or Die" community.
In Solidarity,
YOUR NAME HERE
Communicate or Die
http://www.communicateordie.com
Suggestion
Looks familiar. :)
There's a part in there that says "Based on what I discovered about you on the web, I thought you might be interested". That should either be removed or customized to the sender's relationship to the recipient.
Suggestion follow-up
So then with those provisos, it's a go, right?
BTW, does this application have a e-mail notofication back to the forum participantes letting them know that someone added a reply to the forum thread. That would really be helpful and a spell checker, I want you to notice that I left out the Red Corvette and hot babe in my contract demands. LOL
Cheers,
Tony
Email notifications
Yes, there is a module that allows you to subscribe to different topics. I have plans to install it at some point. I just haven't gotten to it. Thanks for prompting me.
Spellchecker
There is no Drupal module that provides a spell checker that I am aware of. I know Google offers APIs (Application Programming Interface) for providing this service. But this would take some time for me to investigate and install. I would like this feature but it may be some time before I get to it.
By the way, there is a "Suggestion box" topic: http://www.communicateordie.com/forum/25
Subscriptions have been enabled
Tony, you'll notice that you can now subscribe to individual topics in the forums by clicking on the "subscribe post" link located in the first post to the topic. You can also subscribe to entire forum categries by going to http://www.communicateordie.com/subscriptions
Now they are disabled
The feature wasn't working so I disabled it until I can get it figured out.
OK, re-enabled
Seems to work.
Subscribe to Forums
OK but why, I already registered. What is the point of having to subscribe to individual forums?
Cheers,
Tony
It sends you an e-mail
It sends you an e-mail when someone posts a topic in a category you are interested in. This saves you from having to check the site every few hours to see if anyone reponsed to you.
It sends you an E-mail
Oh, Cool,I get an e-mail message when someone posts in the thread. Excellent.
Folks at International Unions
Folks that I think should definitely be in on these discussions are the communication professionals at the International Unions. Anyone know an avenue for reaching them?
Folks at International Unions
I think you will find a very real split personality in this regard. These people often have deep feelings about Solidarity, etc. and will voice them both privately and in public. What they may say about activism publicly will depend on what they are able to say and not jeopardize their jobs. International Unions are noted for censoring activism that is not first approved by all the legal minds. I would suggest you simply go to the web sites and start with them ... but don't expect to win the private view unless you are willing to respect the public face they must wear.
Michael
Excellent point
I was aware of this only subconciuosly. Thanks for really helping to crytallize this for me with some real concrete language.
Labor Leaders
Yes, all very true. And there is more complexity. Steve wishes to attract the technical staff geeks at the International, and on top of that asks us to nominate labor leaders who have Blogs. That seems to leave out a lot of labor leaders.
There are activest shop floor leaders as well as the leaders with heirarchial status, who do not Blog yet work with and use other IT tech gizmos, there are academics who do not Blog, yet have huge portfolios of digital and hard copy to their resumes and organizing work, and there are labor leaders of all types who do not touch a keyboard or mouse and only use face to face organizing.
My point is these three groups and more are not addressed in the outreach plan. And it seems as if the direction here is if you don't Blog you are not a labor leader.
Additionally I haven't even mentioned or listed other kinds of IT tech, like Internet Radio, streaming audio and video and real time conferenceing to name a few. Any of which is available to labor leaders to use.
The story for me is that there are various methods of communicating.
Comments please?
Cheers, Tony
re: blogs of labor leaders
The subtitle of this site is: "American Labor Unions and the Internet". It wouldn't make much sense to call attention to leaders who use face-to-face communication on a site with a subtitle like that. Nor would it make sense to call attention to leaders who use PalmPilots or other such gizmos. And I'm not sure where you would get the idea that I'm insinuating that "if you don't blog you are not a labor leader." Perhaps you are reading too much into it.
So, let me state that the only purpose of that feature is to encourage leaders to get a blog. Also, it's just plain interesting for readers to see what labor leaders are blogging about. I only wish there were more to catalog and show on our site. I thought I would find many more. It turns out that since there are so few leaders who blog, that the feature ends up showing how badly unions are using the net.
As far as why just focus on labor leaders, I explain that elsewhere on this site. See http://www.communicateordie.com/node/42#comment-76 and my response.
re: blogs of leaders II
Tony, also read http://www.communicateordie.com/node/36#comment-62 and the discussion that follows. It also touches on the issue that you raise about only focusing on labor leaders. There was some discussion there about starting a list of other bloggers who are not leaders. Read that and tell me what you think.
re: streaming audio/video
I consider streaming audio/video less effective and interesting than a blog. First, they are one-way communication mediums and second they just aren't very cutting edge. In my opinion, a list of sites that use them just wouldn't be very interesting. So I don't really see a compelling reason to start a list of unions that use these technologies. To me, it would be about as interesting as a list of unions that have web sites.
streaming video
I did some research a few months back on the use of video on internationals' sites - see here and here.
I think the use of videos by unions bears watching (even if it's slightly off-topic) because it's going to be an increasingly important tool. I suspect that in a few years all new televisions are going to be "internet enabled", and the lines between TV and the web are going to start to get hazy.
It would be interesting to know how much time the average union member spends online vs. watching TV! Once everyone can surf the web on the couch with their remote controls, the importance of unions having good web sites will increase. And visitors will come to the sites with the expectation of being able to access video content.
Streaming audio I'm not so keen on beyond the fact that it's less expensive and labor-intensive to produce. Clearly the project along these lines that's most advanced is WINS. But I suspect that as budget permits and more union members get broadband access, they'll end up adding video content to the audio.
What the AFL-CIO should be doing about this
There is great site: www.ourmedia.org which, incidentally, is Drupal powered. I just learned that the site has been nominated as a finalist in the UN World Summit Awards. See this link for details.
Anyway, the AFL-CIO should be developing a site exactly like this---a centralized repository for streaming audio and video made by unions and unions members. Now that would be cutting edge use of the Internet.
Please repost this as a new forum topic
This comment deserves its own topic, I think.
Can you quickly repost this at http://www.communicateordie.com/forum/45?
Just click on "Post new forum topic" once there. Thanks!
outreach a couple ideas
There's an upcoming event in Milwaukee. This used to be called radfest
but is now called the Midwest Social Forum. July 6 - 9 at the UW Milwaukee campus.
http://www.mwsocialforum.org/
Very inexpensive lodging if you stay in the dorm! (see the registration
form for info about lodging.
http://www.mwsocialforum.org/forms/register.htm
I've gone to the past couple of these. Wonderful very committed people.
Another idea I have is promoting women's unionism. There is a women's union http://www.cluw.org/
I have found tho that no one there reads email. Women in particular could benefit from more use of technology because they tend to be bogged down by committments and can't attend meetings so they get left out of the loop. So in theory they could participate more via an online source. Well that's the theory :-)