Got Labor Tech?

We've been busy blogging. We run a bunch of blogs in any case, to keep stakeholder groups updated on different projects, but are now trying something a bit different.

Policy debate is increasingly happening online now, and in a two-way format. You can scribble public comments all over the news and the reports of think tanks, and we're not really in a position to make use of this. Also we have excellent policy people who are restricted to communicating in the 1.0 way - writing reports or releases periodically when their academic work builds up enough. They don't stop thinking in between though, and are the perfect people to be putting across informed union opinion on current affairs, making our policy communications much more responsive to the news agenda.

We've got a new blog at www.touchstoneblog.org.uk, which is aimed at getting policy officers more used to the new environment. Starting off by writing policy comment directly, but eventually building on an understanding of the medium (how to evaluate which blogs are worth working with, and which are about cats, how to defend our arguments online in the not-so-niceties of blog debate, and how to take our analysis onto the turf of people who are commenting in our area, rebutting opposing opinions from an informed perspective where it's needed and supporting new alliances where there's the opportunity.

Let us know what you think. Early days yet, but everyone we've worked with seems to have taken to stage 1 surprisingly well, and there's some great content being added which we'd not normally have seen in public (sorry it's a bit Anglocentric). Any tips on what to do better would also be gratefully accepted!

Warning this is not non-partisan:

http://www.cnnbcvideo.com/taf.shtml?hp=1

I wonder how they did it. Pretty cute.

http://howtheuniversityworks.com/wordpress/archives/164

"At 12:01 am on election day, thousands of younger voters and activists will simultaneously reset their Facebook pages to display a get-out-the-vote message–using a new application that allows users to “donate” their status lines to a third party.

The application allows users to specify whether they want to get out the vote for a particular candidate or on a non-partisan basis. With a single click, users can solicit all of their friends to donate their status lines as well.

When I started writing this post, the number of users “donating” their status lines to the message was 45,304. By the time I posted, the number had risen to 47,108.

...."

(I'm posting this stuff as examples of things that could be adapted to

labor campaigns.)

Of the three suggestions so far, John Wood's is probably most in line with what we're looking to discuss further because it's a strategy that he's involved with as a union tech person. The policy blog at http://www.touchstoneblog.org.uk/ is quite a good model for other labor organizations and bears a more detailed look-see in our pages, I think.

The other two ideas are certainly interesting. The Facebook hack requires having a good enough idea or a big enough Facebook constituency (or more likely, both) to be able to work. But it's certainly quite useful to those able to pull it off. The customizable videos was recently used by MoveOn.org in support of the Obama campaign extremely effectlivey. I'd be very curious to hear if any labor folks have done anything similar.

Hey we're tech people. We're supposed to know stuff?

Is there an easy way to make a video thing like that?

Do we have to send a salt into moveon to get the scoop ? :-)

I have a suggestion that COD change the forum software.

I tried to post something and was not at all successful.

Is there a different module you can pick for this? I've met a lot of

places to post stuff and posted to them without problem.

Suppose you are a naive user and you think 'I want to post something'.

What do you do? Well it looks like it'd be "post content" which has 5 choices

under it. I assumed it would be "forum topic"

So it let's you create a post and you have to select a forum. hmmm.

2 have no dashes in front. many have 1 dash. and some have 2 dashes.  I have

no idea the significance of that. Well it turns out that doesn't work if one had selected

"general discussion" which is the first one. Nothing else I tried worked either. once you pick that

you're doomed. Seems like you can't change it after the fact.  But it doesn't check it until you actually tell it to post it.

I would suggest changing the module to a more simple minded approach where

it only presents the choices that the person will be able to successfully use and

no ringers. You definitely don't want the first choice to not work since users assume the

first one is the most popular and the one they should probably use. And what is the significance of all those entries starting "archives"?

And last but not least why do these entry boxes have to be so narrow? The viewport is narrower than

the destination of the text. Few people want to scroll right or left. I'd change that.

I'd make the viewport and the width of the text window the same.