Labour Union

One of the things is common in technology conferences these days is side gatherings that are informally called to discuss certain issues.  They are generally referred to as Birds of a Feather Gathering.  Today I participated in two sessions (discussing nonprofits & CiviCRM) and initiated two (focusing on governments & unions).  All were quite interesting and a good opportunity to talk with people passionate about a sector they are involved in.

In both sessions there were nearly 15 people involved.  Considering the multiple presentations and discussion sessions that were available at that time I was very happy to see this type of turnout.  Both sessions there were active discussions that could have gone on for much longer.

So in the government talk it was impressive to hear about all of the new projects and initiatives that were going on in government. Certainly with Obama there is a new drive towards open source, their Rebuilding America site is a good example of that. One consultant reported that just earier in the day two .gov websites had been thrown her way.  Others discussed the adoption of Alfresco for file management and integration issues with Drupal as a great solution for organizations.  MediaWiki was also brought up as a very popular PHP/MySQL tool that is being actively used by the diplomatic community, the intelligence community & even the State department.

There's been a rapid flurry of political activity in Ottawa this week as it seems like Ottawa may a union of the Liberals & NDP successfully challenge Stephen Harper's minority government.  With the position of Bloc Québécois in Federal politics it is very difficult for any one party to obtain a majority government.  Working cooperatively in coalition governments is going to be an increasingly important skill for Canadian politicians.  We've been busy over the weekend setting up the Canadian Labour Congress' online action tool so that that they can encourage their supporters to send emails to their MP's.  It is interesting too to see how many other people are doing the same thing:

• CUPE's Make Parliament Work
• Rideau Institute's Smart Vote 2008
• Canadians for a Progressive Coalition

Well, I just got back from a whirlwind tour of Toronto.  I had agreed to present at the LabourTech 2008 conference back in March, when Chris Lawson, CUPE's Webmaster, asked me to participate.  I was very impressed to see the turnout this weekend.  There was quite a large turnout from Canada's Trade Union community.  It is the first event of it's kind I know about and it was great to see this many people get out and discuss.

I was part of a 3hr panel, the Open Source CMS Smackdown, which was a very friendly review of open source content management systems and a more in-depth comparison between Word Press & Drupal. HiMY SYeD & Ian Clysdale, from CUPE, were with me and it we had some great participation from the audience as well. The participants were using everything from collections of HTML pages to Plone, Mambo, Joomla & of course Drupal. We did talk a lot about what are things to consider when choosing a CMS for your organization.

After that presentation I had time to go to half of the web campaign presentation on online campaigns. I though it was an interesting talk, focusing on the content and ensuring that the campaign is built around needs and identifying targets.  I also liked the emphasis for online newsletters where the presenters said that each action newsletter needs to contain both a crisis and opportunity.  Unfortunately, I had to leave after the first half of the session to present on Client Relationship Management databases.

We recently upgraded the OctopusBooks.ca website from Drupal 4 to 5. In the process, we decided to upgrade the eCommerce module to the new Ubercart 1.0 shopping cart.  There are many flexible product and shipping options available in Ubercart and the whole shopping process is more slick and simple.

New blocks were added to take showcase the in-house and aggregated content that had been added to the website but was not being highlighted.  The blocks ranging from 'News' to 'Reviews' were randomized to give the site a fresh look each visit.

Well, a year ago we decided to become a part of Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB). I was convinced that there would be more financial benefits to belonging to a large body of small businesses, and I think those have been proven correct.  I also have called to get some support from them in the past and find the staff I've talked to be helpful and knowledgable.  The regulations and paperwork are difficult to keep up with and I am glad that the CFIB has sent me material that has helped my business stay within health government guidelines.

I went to the Ottawa Folk Festival last weekend and had a great time watching some amazing performances and meeting lots of wonderful people. Like many successful festivals it is filled with people who make this a regular event and where one can see people in your community that you don't always run into.

One of the first people that I ran into was Jake Morison who was one of the volunteer photographers for the event.  Jake's a good photographer, but it was amazing to see how much photography gear many people at the festival had.  Over the course of the three days there must have been hundreds of thousands of photos taken by the official photographers, media, artists, but mostly by the thousands of people who attended this festival.  

With all of the digital cameras around it is a real lost opportunity not to be encouraging folks to share them by tagging their photos, videos & blog posts with ottawafolkfestival or ottawafolk.  It's a nice way to build community online, and festivals are all about community & great memories.  Like with the Facebook groups that was set up, it is free to set this up and encourage people to participate.  Unlike Facebook though the Flickr interface allows users much more control over the rights to their pictures (especially allowing people to select a Creative Commons license). 

The Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) is the national body for unions across this country and the largest democratic and popular organization in Canada with over three million members.   We support the website and web servers and have done so since 2005.  We set up both their recent Drupal site as well as the content management system that preceded it.  Both have had the requirements for online action campaigns and for dynamic bilingual content. The CLC has consolidated several of it's websites within Drupal.  Working with their in-house communications staff, we did not produce the designs for this site. Our server work has included support for their mailing lists and newsletters. 

Ok, I admit, it's been a very long day. However, I was looking through my logs at recent hits and stumbled across someone who had come to our site using the phrase "union organizing software". We're in the top 5 from 144,000 using that phrase. It's useful because we're in the business of providing organizing software to progressive groups like labour unions.

Earlier this week I was asked to put together a plan for a staff/member communications tool for one of the bigger unions in the United States & Canada. In writing it I realized that this is a framework that plenty of other unions and locals could also benefit from, so thought I would re-write it for a more generalized audience and post it up on the web.

I've been discussing using CiviCRM's SMS messaging capabilities to better organize unions for a month or so now with the folks at Union Web Services.