Open Source: union officer debates online

More on this later, but this is a good trend -- well not yet a trend, but good initiatives: videotaped union officer election debates. Youtube and google video make it easy to get this out to members and the public.

The first is the debate among candidates for president of TWU Local 100 in New York City. Local 100 has a long history of dissent and debate, though union officers have not always been friendly to it. This time, the candidates agreed to participate in a debate hosted by Cornell University and the Joseph Murphy Center at the City University of New York.

I found the debate lackluster, the format did not seem to suit the candidates and the focus on the presidential race does not reflect the internal political action in Local 100, where there is a lot of action in the various divisions and at the shop floor level, rather than just at the top. Techinically, the format is unwieldy -- long video, not broken into segments, poor captioning. Still, this goes in the "every union should do this" category. Just do it better.

Here's the link(couldn't embed the video here):

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5617710936433562863&hl=en

The other example I know of is the Forum in the recent Teamster elections, where challenger Tom Leedham debated "Hoffa stand-in" Tom Keegel. A much more successful debate and much better technical presentation -- the debate is broken into segments so you can hear the whole thing at once, or just the segments that interest you. Of course, in the Teamsters, the degree of transparency and debate in the election process is directly tied to the ongoing presence of the federal government monitorship. Would the IBT have voluntarily hosted such a a debate, and posted it on the website?

The debate video is gone from the Teamster site, it seems (I couldn't find it). But it is still available here: http://www.ibtvote.org/forum.htm (scroll down).

Have any other unions done this?