I am interested in seeing how people are adopting Facebook for organizing and mobilizing communities. I wrote a short blog back in March about how political organizations were using it, but am continually amazed at the useful and useless groups that people are joining. Using Facebook to let members self-organize and communicate together promises to be the biggest innovation to union organizing that we've seen in a long time. I initially stumbled across a few union groups on Facebook while I was browsing through my list of friends.

This isn't a comprehensive list, but I thought it was worth sampling which unions are represented and how many individuals have joined. Here's the list of unions I found who have members in Canada as of May 3, 2007:

• AFM Union Musicians - 30 members
• Canadian Machinists - 1 member
• CAW Youth Network - 40 members
• CUPE Local 23 - 1 member
• CUPE Local 1183 - 18 members
• CUPE - 161 members
• CUPE Local 4163 - 13 members
• CUPE Local 3903 - 44 members
• CUPW - 32 Members
• IAFF Professional Firefighters - 121 members
• International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employes (IATSE) - 181 members
• UA Local 787 - 36 members
• UFCW Canada - 33 members

Of those there was only one that placed access restrictions to limit who could join - "This group is now a closed group, this means members must disclose IAFF local affiliation before approval to join. (Send a message to an admin after requesting to join)". The benefits of closing a group are obvious, especially since people are already being fired for things they have posted in Facebook.

Most of the people who had started these groups and were administering them seemed to be youth or grad students, which makes sense since this is where Facebook initially started. The challenge though is that these are self appointed people who just thought that their union would benefit if they organized a group to allow people to opt-in. The openness of Facebook is powerful, but these networks are open to management as well as to union members. It is worth noting that there are less than 500 individuals who have signed up at this time, never-the-less there does seem to be quite a lot of momentum with this tool.

I set up a small survey to learn more about how unions are using Facebook, but have had to take it down recently. There is a lot for organizers to learn about how to make good use of these new tools.

I just added a few facebook links to my delicious links, more about facebook organizing.