The great labor leader blog hunt is on!
Submitted by Steve Dondley on Sat, 06/18/2005 - 12:31pm.
Communicate or Die is going on a hunting expedition for American labor leaders who maintain a blog on the Internet. We need your help tracking down and bagging these bold labor leaders so we can display them in our trophy room and help them win public recognition for their efforts.
How to "bag" a union leader
- To "bag" a labor leader you must register with Communicate or or Die. Register here.
- Check our Trophy Room to make sure you've found a new leader.
- Fill out the form.
Update:
Instead of just high profile union leaders, we are accepting blogs of any union officer or staff members. We are considering starting a similar list for rank and file union members but we still need to settle on the criteria for inclusion. Read the comments below for more on this discussion.
Happy hunting!
what makes a blog a blog?
I noticed Rick Bloomingdale's blog doesn't seem to provide members with the option of responding to the postings. I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing; public two-way communication can be a double-edged sword (or should I say double-edged pen?)
But does it really differ that much from posting a periodic "secretary-treasurer's report" on the site? Quite a few unions do something along those lines, though there are many who don't but should.
It's also worth noting that many union web sites include "members only" sections, and some of them may well include blogs or the functional equivalents. If any contributors to this site include members of such unions, I'd be interested in hearing what sort of material these members-only sections contain - without publicizing any sensitive material, of course.
Good question
I think one key criteria is that a blog isn't just for promulgating official business and perfunctory reports. It's a more intimate, informal style of writing that reflects the writer's personal thoughts and opinions. It should also be updated frequently.
But I think a blog is more than a style of writing. It's also a technology that has particular features like an RSS feed, comment system, content managment functionality for displaying and navigating blog entries, etc.
In the case of Bloomingdale's feed, though it doesn't have comments, it certainly has other functionality that fits the bill. So I'd definitely consider it a blog.
What is the purpose?
Steve, I have a big question.
WHY (!?!??!) are you only "interested in blogs of high ranking union officers."
The main purpose of weblogs, wiki and drupal itself is that is social software. One of the main points of this new kind of technology is that it can be used to devolve power (see MeatballWiki:DevolvePower http://tinyurl.com/bwk8d).
I would contend that this site would be interested in *any* union person that operated a social software site. (weblogs without commenting would not fall in that category for me) The reason is that we need to pull *all* of our resources together to try and create a synergy to catapult the dinasour ways that union communicate.
That's my line and I am stickin to it.
Two reasons: It's interesting to most and might encourage others
Don't you think it's interesting to note that there are so few labor blogs out there? Wouldn't you think it's a good idea to have a centralized easy to access list of labor leaders who do have blogs?
Also, The reason I focus on leaders is because I want to encourage them to start blogs. If leaders don't lead and don't communicate directly with their membership, I think that's a problem.
But you are right, I should start a listing of individuals who blog about unions and union issues. But then I struggle with the criteria for deciding who makes the list. How do we decide who gets included? By vote? What criteria should we use? Do they have to be a member of a unions? How much of their blog has to be about unions? I would appreciate some input on this.
Very interesting wiki link there. But I'm not convinced social software (this term should get added to our glossary) is going to do away with a need for representative democracy and elected leaders any time soon. At least, not in our lifetimes. The software used to run this site, Drupal, allows many people to moderate and share power. But it's not set up to completely devolve power equally to every member. I think that might work for wikis but for building a community, I have serious doubts. But that's a topic for another discussion. If you want to talk about this more, please start a forum topic.
Let's start
I don't want to get bogged down in who should be on a list. How about we just start listing weblogs that have union content, then we can seperate the leaders and other categories somehow. I would prefer to keep the list on a wiki, so it is easily maintained by anyone.
Here are lists that either I maintain, or know about:
http://unionlabel.redrag.net/members.html
http://detroitcosh.blogspot.com/
http://coalitionofgraduateemployeeunions.blogspot.com/
http://groups.blogdigger.com/groups.jsp?id=964
http://thebellman.org/aggregator/categories/3
As far as social software, this site is social software. I am not making any claims other than I think static websites are not as useful for communication as social software sites (weblogs, wikis, drupal, zope, etc.)
Thoughts
You say a wiki is "easily maintained by anyone." You're going to have to convince me of that. Learning any kind of syntax, even a relatively simple one like wiki uses, is going to leave out a large portion of the population.
I can quite easily set up a form much like the one for the labor leaders which I think is much more user friendly. I can also make it so that you don't have to be a registered user to enter the data into the form. And one big advantage of doing it with Drupal is that they go into a database which makes it easier to manage and easier for making entries on a very long list. It would also allow for classification and searches of the items.
The list of blogs at unionlabel.redrag.net highlights my concerns about which blogs should be included. I bumped into that site a couple of weeks ago. Although those blogs may be union members (I can't verify that, however), the ones I looked at had nothing to do with unions. Personally, I wouldn't want to include them. I definitely think there needs to be some kind of editorial control and policy to help separate the wheat from the chafe. I'm not a control freak, I just want whatever goes up on CoD to be interesting and useful. I don't think one huge directory of blogs of questionable quality fits the bill.
Let me know what you think.
wiki thoughts - weblog thoughts.
With a wiki, there is no need for anyone to learn any syntax to add content. That is a simple fact. They can just add content. This is how I started. I knew no html, no machine code, nothing. That is what excites me about wiki. Click edit and type. You can learn the simple syntax to start making your content prettier, but it is not necessary.
On a wiki we could easily decide what weblogs were union supporters, had union content or were "union leaders". This is easy, because we can move items around simply, no need to figure out what the categories are or who controls what is added. You or I or anyone else can move the link, explain why they thought it should be moved and it stays or someone else moves it, etc.
I don't think you are a control freak Steve! :-) Just grappling with how to make a useful union website. I have been struggling, on the user end, about how to help create a site like CoD since January 2002. I am pleased that you created CoD, it is the closest so far to what I think is useful.
I am not thrilled with the UFCW sites, only because I am not a fan of forums because they are permanent threaded conversations. Speaking of seperating wheat from the chafe, threaded conversations have no hope of doing that. Why would someone want to read this thread in two years, ten years? In a wiki, we can have this conversation and when it becomes clear what we want to say, we refactor the page to what is important, this is commonly known as "document mode".
Kevin did set up a wiki on RetailWorkers.com but he broke the social contract we had by taking it down one day, with no warning. I don't want to work on building something and have it taken down, that is happened to many times. I would love to have a wiki in conjunction to this site, especially if we can move freely between the weblog and the wiki, with wiki words.
What we really need
Our goals are the same but our means for achieving the them is different. What we really need is a wiki functionality built into Drupal to solve this problem. I know it has been done before but I'm not sure if the code is maintainined and would still work with more recent versions of Drupal.
Let me do some research on the Drupal site and get back to you on this.
How did the RetailWorker wiki project work out?
I'm interested in hearing what worked, and what didn't. What reason was given for taking it down? And the Kevin that you mention, is that the same guy who does LaborCommons.org? He seems to be pretty big on Drupal, too.
Try this out
Mark,
Go to www.communicateordie.com/node/56 and edit the page there by clicking on 'edit'. You have to be logged in. You can use wiki syntax there.
I think this might work and would be a good compromise solution for now. I'd rather keep as much material in Drupal as possible.
It's wiki-like in that every time you make a change to the page, the old version of that page is kept. You'll notice there is also a way to create a "child page" of the main page. One way that feature might be use way to navigate and categorize the different types of blogs.
Let's give this a whirl and see how we like it.
another approach in the UK
We're hunting for union blogs too in the UK, and have a site to aggregate the feeds and republish for people to subscribe to everything - http://www.tigmoo.co.uk
They're few and far between - we've only got 21 so far, but that's a start. The plan is to emulate the success of http://www.bloggers4labour.org, another activist run site which aggregates blogs, and has done a lot to encourage Labour party bloggers in the UK.
Good luck in the hunt!
John
Criteria
Deciding what blogs are featured is a very hard decision to make. I have been working on building a sturdy labor news aggregator on the Workers Independent News site and while I can find many blogs from individuals in unions, I don't want our aggregator to be filled with entries about personal stuff. Your criteria should be if the person writes about things that are of interest to your site - such as software (as mentioned below) and building internet labor communications. My criterion has been individuals who blog roughly 75 percent of the time about labor issues important to working families - such as reform, healthcare, pensions.
Labor has really missed the boat when it comes to the Internet, but I think it mostly has been because until recently the software has looked labor intensive and they have been under the impression that they would need a permanent web person. Programs like Drupal (which we use) and Civicspace can really turn that around. If unions keep mining the forward thinking political campaigns (like UFCW did by signing up a bunch of former Dean staffers for WakeUpWalmart), then eventually we will see more social software popping up. I think the social software would work best for districts and locals while the nationals and internationals should stick with the professional web page, but include a blog section for members.
Welcome, Jesse
Thanks for taking the time to post your thoughts.
I frequently mention elsewhere on the site that I'm a huge believer in the power of the Drupal/CivicSpace platform. It's not perfect but it has a lot of talented developers who are taking in very powerful and exciting directions. I've made some minor code contributions to the Drupal project myself.
It seems the "social software" term is cropping up more and more these days. I wasn't exposed to it until a couple of weeks ago. I think it has a better ring to it than "community software." I'm going to add it to this site's glossary.
Developing criteria can be a bit tricky. One interesting possibility is to open up blog submissions to a vote by the CoD community. If they are approved, they would get on the list. Majority vote rules. But I don't think the CoD has a critical mass of users yet to pull that off. I'll keep this idea in mind.
By the way, I checked out the Altered States Press site, very cool.
UBC VP
Just came across the blog of someone named Scott Brineman who is running for VP of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters. Just thought I would point him out because if he gets elected he should be put in the trophy room.
Great find!
I'm going to reach out to him and invite him over here to talk about his experiences.
This is where I would argue
leader blog
Hey how do we put a blog in the labor leader blog roll?
I clicked on the "form" and it didn't do anything.
Are you sure this is set up correctly? Also I didn't
see any entries in the "trophy room". If you could please
check the setup of this. thanks.