Communising (or Organications)

This courtesy of Brian Shaler’s very cute crappy graphs graph-maker. So… I reckon a number of unions and some membership organisations are having problems in taking up as much of the 2.0 whizziness as they could because we’ve been a bit too used to our organisational structures too long.

Dogged campaigners

A cause close to my heart this week, with a campaign from the CWU to tighten the Dangerous Dogs Act, to spare the nation’s posties from the jaws of the nation’s best friends. Up to 6,000 UK posties are attacked by dogs every year on their rounds, and many injured seriously, just so dog owners …

Will the real Pippa Wagstaff please stand up?

Another Facebook exile, but a whole different problem. Pippa Wagstaff runs a critical blog on Welsh politics – Miss Wagstaff Presents. She recently found herself on the receiving end of an email from Facebook customer services, just like booted-out unionist Derek Blackadder. The charge though was that Pippa wasn’t really Pippa at all, and as …

It’s MySpace or the highway!

Anne All at IT Business Edge has a post about a recent(ish) survey, which suggested39% of US 18-24 year-olds would consider quitting their job if their employer banned Facebook (with another 21% who would be ‘annoyed’). Worth a read – as are the comments. Anne’s response is a common one in the media, helpfully suggesting …

Bad news and bad GNUs

After the news that the ZCTU’s Wellington Chibebe and Lovemore Matombo will need to wait another month for their trial in Harare, keeping them silenced on unfair bail conditions that prohibit their addressing public gatherings, there are now worrying reports of another way the Mugabe regime is trying to shut up the embattled Zimbabwean union …

We are ZCTU

A quick, and getting rather late, plug for the new ITUC website, We Are ZCTU (www.wearezctu.org). It’s set up in support of Wellington Chibebe and Lovemore Matombo of the Zimbawe Congress of Trade Unions, who are due in court in Harare this Wednesday (30 July). They’ve been charged with “spreading falsehoods prejudicial to the state”, …

Lovely as a cloud

That’s prettier than anything purporting to categorise me has any right to be. Wordle – Beautiful Word Clouds – is just that. It’s a clever little site that interprets documents, or in this case RSS feeds (the one from this here blog), and makes clouds to highlight common themes. Very much fun playing with it, …

Davide and Goliath

Worrying news out of Italy for us labor-geeks. Davide Barillari, a rep with IBM Italy, and one of the prime movers behind the international web-based linking and virtual world protests of the last year, is concerned his union may be trying to sideline his attempts to evangelise for the transition to a 2.0 organisation, by …

Mosaic, mo problems

Wellington Chibebe and Lovemore Matombo are the leaders of the Zimbabwean union federation, the ZCTU. They were arrested after a May Day rally for ‘spreading falsehoods prejudicial to the state’ (ie: telling the truth) and Mugabe is trying to silence them in the run up to the run off of the presidential election, with a …

How do you solve a problem like Blackadder?

Remember Derek? 3,000 Facebook unionists came together to get our Canadian pal reinstated in the good book, after he was banned for making friends too quickly, whilst trying to evaluate Facebook for unions and campaigners. Well, now he’s out on his cyber-ear again. He was kicked this time, apparently with no hope of reinstatement as …