Resources and tools

For the second year in a row, the Communication Workers of America's "Speed Matters" campaign has released "A Report on Internet Speeds in All 50 States." The campaign surveyed almost 230,000 people in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico between May 2007 and May 2008 on their speedmatters.org website to gather the necessary data.

by Steve Dondley and Jason Pramas

Quite the brouhaha this week between the AFL-CIO and arch-union buster Richard Berman.

It seems the AFL posted a blog entry in the "anti-union network" section of their American Rights at Work site that included newly-public documents from an ongoing lawsuit by Smithfield Foods against the United Food and Commercial workers. The documents detailed Berman's relationship to Smithfield.

Have you ever wanted to have your own TV channel? Or at least wanted the ability to broadcast your own programming live to many people at once?

If so, the future is here now thanks to live interactive video broadcast technology on the internet (if not, the future is still here now).

Twitter is yet another free Internet service that could open up new possibilities for union communication. Read on for more.

You've got a blog, posted a couple of podcasts and some videos on YouTube, now get ready for the next hot way to communicate: live streaming video. You heard it here first. A new company, less than 1/2 year old, called Ustream, offers live video streams to anyone who wants one, absolutely free. I've set one up and coupled it with a live chat feature for my company, Prometheus, and I absolutely love it.

Is it now relatively easy perchance to install drupal
via one of those hosted accounts (where one's capabilities
tend to be pretty restricted and they tend to assume any
thing that needs to be done can be done via cpanel)? It was once
the case that drupal was seriously on the outs with cpanel.
I hope that has changed?

I'm thinking of getting back in the web site business
to promote select issues in my corner of the jungle especially since I got kicked off of my "own" mailing list! (Ok they couldn't really evict me when I owned the account housing the list since only I could remove addresses, but in the interests of democracy I decided to go along with the group's decision which was basically that the really talkative people should shut up. Democracy can be a pain when it doesn't go your way :-) Seriously tho it just takes one of those "I cannot tolerate any 'nonessential' messages" types to completely chill off a list in my experience. I've seen many a technical mailing list get sunk by one or two of the 'signal-to-noise' or "off-topic" chronic dampeners. It is very unlikely in my experience that a mailing list won't just plain die once even just one person of stature puts out the "stifle it" message.

Which is probably why people invented forums :-) What is good about a mailing list is potentially limiting it to the right
people eg if one wants to cover workplace issues and not have
management reading along. I have yet to see a really good way
to implement this as a forum without having people apply and
be approved to have accounts which they have to log in to and
all that... Am I missing any developments in that area?

Slideroll introduced a new Gallery AV tool yesterday. Its free and very simple to use. I made 7 galleries and uploaded them in 20 minutes. Its great for showing rallys and events on site with no flash experience. Here it is on my local370voice site http://www.local370voice.com/rouguesgallery/
Here is where you get it. http://www.slideroll.com

Skype is a voice over internet protocol program or VoIP. Kari over at Politics and Technology asks a good question about the availability of the technology and the potential to use it for organized activity.

Thanks to Francisco Cendejas for posting this to his social bookmarking.

SEIU is the only union using these free internet video services. Hopefully they will spark others.

http://static.flickr.com/62/198601855_30636e3111.jpg

I posted a few things on this topic before, but at the Labor Notes conference interest meeting, I was again surprised to find that a number of people are overly afraid of the risks of retaliation for online speech. I will continue to work on this -- we need a good one page summary of legal rights for union webstewards (official and unofficial). If anyone has questions about their free speech rights, or faces retaliation or threats of retaliation for their online speech about union affairs, please contact the Association for Union Democracy. We will do our best to help.

Here's another little project I've been working on lately (though perhaps not worthy of front page treatment at this point) - I'm polishing off a BA in Labor Studies at UMass at the ripe age of 49 and as part of my "senior project" I'm working on three proposed Drupal installations.

The first two will be used to store and index PDF archives of Labor Notes and The Labor Page (its Boston equivalent, presently in hibernation).

The third site is a bit more interesting. I'd like to help set up a central respository for people to share links to online labor images, including any known copyright info, for use in (primarily) web sites and multimedia.

I've made an attempt at creating - well, mostly stealing - a taxonomy for sorting contributed images. I'd be interested to hear what CoDers think of the format and of the project in general.

At the Labor Notes conference, there was discussion of using flickr.com as a repository for labor images. But I see that they're a subsidiary of Yahoo, which makes me wonder if the service is going to be free forever.

Back in September, Google launched a new website blogsearch.google.com that allows you to very efficiently search the world's blogs. If you want to find out what folks are saying about unions and workers, this is a great tool.

If this survey is to be believed, very few of you out there know what RSS is (12%) and even fewer are actullay using it these feeds (4%). Given that the labor movement is woefully behind others, I'd estimate these numbers to be 3% and 1% respectively for labor movement type folks.

REDIRECTED TO --- http://www.communicateordie.com/node/232

Does anyone else read the writings, academic and otherwise, on organized labor & information technology? I volunteer to start a running annotated bibliography of union/information technology papers and essays (below). A wiki would be the best format for this, but anyone that can contribute to this, please do.

Moderator: maybe this could become a top-level book?

http://www.onlinerights.ca

"a grassroots organization that promotes the public's interest in technology and information policy. We believe that Canadians should have a voice in copyright law, access to information, freedom from censorship, and other issues that we face in the digital world."