Best practices and techniques

Just curious if CorD types are using the Ubuntu Linux distribution and if you are promoting it. Seems like a good fit, certainly for the techie types here and open source advocates, but also increasingly good for users with no experience beyond Windows or Mac. I bought a Dell xps with ubuntu pre-installed and after a little initial apprehension am finding it a real pleasure to work with. I'm new to Linux, so I'm a good test case of the usability of Ubuntu for newbies. If you want to check it out you can download the software, burn a CD and run it on your PC without installing it. (Haven't tried that, mine was preinstalled.)

I have reported on Steve Sloan's great work on his blog My unions, CSUEU & CFA (Steward uses camera phone for health and safety and

Podcasting from the Eboard Meeting -- CSU Employees Union)

His recent posts on using Social networks, SMS/Texting and user generated content sites like YouTube for union building and participation are quite good.

<cite>Understanding the ability for social groups to define and communicate virtually using tools like Facebook, move synchronously using portable devices like cell phones and technologies like texting, and communicate dynamically using technologies like YouTube and understanding how pervasively this capability has been adopted by younger people, is a key concept to being able to organize them.</cite>

Take a look -- and let's add him to the blogroll (do we have one?)

Steve Sloan is a shop steward in Chapter 307 of CSUEU, the California State University Emplyees Union at SJSU, San Jose State University, San Jose, California. He uses cell phone photos/blogs to raise health and safety issues and videopodcasts to share interviews with union officers about issues and debates within the union. In this blog entry (from his My Unions blog), Steve advocates using the newest of the new media.

Want to see a hint of what internal union democracy could look like, if union officials embraced the internet and used it promote internal discussion and debate? Check out www.SEIUVoice.org and its coverage of the SEIU International Convention in San Juan, Puerto Rico. (See too the SEIU International's convention site -- the old seiufactchecker.org address now resolves to it -- www.seiu2008.org )

Recently, CorD has seen a low level of activity, much of it consisting of hostile exchanges between two or three people.

As the person who runs the website at the Association for Union Democracy, I try to maintain a pretty liberal links policy when it comes to rank-and-file and independent union websites. AUD is non-partisan, so I link to many sites whose views I don't share personally. My criteria are simple: a) is the site a bona fide, independent, union member site, b) does it aim to make unions stronger? No anti-union sites.

"Anti-union" is a slippery concept, because autocrats call critics anti-union all the time, but there are a few sites that help us define the term: the website of the National Legal Rights and Accountability Project (NLPC) is one.