For The Win: Cory Doctorow and The RJ-45 Trousered Philanthropists

Cory Doctorow has a new young-adult novel out, and it’s something that union organisers and communicators very much need to read. For The Win meshes together the lives of people working in and around MMORPGS, the massively multiplayer online role-playing games which grow in size and value every year. Set about ten minutes into the …

On unions and Open Source

I was thinking today about why trade unions don’t make a bigger deal of Open Source software – not just to use themselves more often, but as a model for the businesses their members work in. We like co-ops well enough, for example, or social enterprises. I guess there could be an element in some …

When the union’s inspiration through its Twitter feed shall run…

People sometimes ask me “John, why should trades unions get involved with Twitter?” No, honest, they really do, my life is *that* exciting at times… My standard response is that it all depends. The microblogging service Twitter is potentially attractive to unions as it’s something of a liberal and Labour ghetto, and it gets a …

Unions that borrow blogs

We’ve seen a whole bunch more union related blogs over the last year, at all levels of the movement (check out the lists at TIGMOO.co.uk for many of them). But one thing I’ve noticed has impressed me in particular, and that’s the first attempts at cleverly using other people’s blogs to talk to members. I’m …