Building GAIA as a planetary social network union to stop capitalism and protect life, peace and justice on Earth

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Orsan Senalp on December 6, 2010 at 1:44

Joining of Peter Waterman and Peter Hall Jones, two very prominent Social Network Unionist, to this group make a quick start possible for the discussion! First I want to thank you both for warm welcoming the initiative.

Let me start thinking how Facebook within very short time become a global company (corporate organisation) that worth 25 billion dollars? Just to compare it to the unionbook and it's potential.

I think it should be about some thing that the Facebook team have added/adding to the social network they have created and continiously recreating. What attracted me initially was the idea that I could find my very old friends, about whom I even forgot everything. Facebook has played on this and these kinds of attractions to make an internet net based social networking valuable and developed relevant tools that make it wasy to use for everyone.

I think if we discover those similar attractoins, functions. ect. that can make social network among unionsts it can go further and open possibilities much more interesting, useful. If we develop tools that are overlapping trade union fonctions, or better may the functions establsihed union structure can not cope with as parts of Unionbook (as event schedule, action support, etc), Unionbook itself or a space within the Unionbook it can be possible create not a market value but so to speak an organisational value.

By also linking it to other existing social networks as facebook and twitter as first things organising fuction can be utilized. Ever member of the unionbook can become an organiser, those people we organise here can also be directed to existing unions. Eric's 1.000.000 member campaign can be thought of as search for new union members as well. New mobile phones are made of direct contact to Twitter and Facebook, this would extend the range of the organising network fpr ver cheap. Trade uinon educators, and organising experts can teach how to do it online. In this way Network Union can start as a complemantary tool. Another important function can be linking with other social movements at the grassroots level, those social movement activists which are already much more familiar with network mechanisms can also be able to reach informal workers easier than unions and get them oranised in unoins.

Unionbook as a social network union form. or a network union within the Unionbook space does not have to be a competive union model to the established unions it is true, but at the same time it should be an alternative, so labor and trade union movement can move forward.

Permalink Reply by Orsan Senalp on December 6, 2010 at 23:54

For a relatively long time humanity is trying to solve a very difficult, multi variable (hish level) differnetial equatoin of transnational solidairty, formin strong union or alliances in order to make wider or total/global justice and equality reality.

After 3 decades, with the demise of neoliberal globalism from the top or quest for capital's global sovereignity which has been baced by transnational English speaking Western states, the crisis is bringing back so called state capitalism.

Since this, with no doubt, will mean for the larger portions of labour and trade unions much more opressive living and working conditions, it is vital today to establish the variables of solidairty equattion and solve it.

In other words, we need now to establsh what stops us to come together and fight back in order to build a new world; what devide us, what pacify us, and how can we overcome these major obstacles as good hard working people.

The Social Network Unionism is about this quest of labour, labour's others, communities, and progressive new middle classes.

Attached presetnation is relevant in this sense.

Attachments:

• TransnationalSolidairtyPPP2011.ppt, 360 KB

Permalink Reply by Orsan Senalp on December 8, 2010 at 22:28

Social Movements 2.0

On September 27, 2007 the world experienced its first virtual strike. In response to a wage dispute, IBM workers in Italy organized a picket outside their company's virtual "corporate campus" based in the 3-D virtual world of SecondLife. According to a report in the Guardian, workers "marched and waved banners, gate-crashed a [virtual] staff meeting and forced the company to close its [virtual] business center to visitors...The protest, by more than 9,000 workers and 1,850 supporting 'avatars' from 30 countries", included a rowdy collection of pink triangles, "sentient" bananas and other bizarro avatars.

While the strike was playful, it was also buttressed by careful planning and organization. Workers set up a virtual strike taskforce, developed educational materials in 3 languages, and held more 20 online worker strategy meetings. The hard work paid off. According to Christine Revkin of the Swiss union federation involved in the strike, the protest led to new negotiations and the workers securing a better deal. Twenty days after the initial protest the Italian CEO of IBM resigned. (Here's a YouTube video from the strike and the new virtual IBM protest museum.)

Stories like this offer a glimpse into the powerful potential of the emerging 2.0 world, a place where workers use social networking tools to quickly reach across national and workplace borders, outflank their bosses, and wield collective power. But right now, the type of virtual solidarity seen in the IBM strike remains more promise than reality. People are willing to sign petitions, donate money, trade information and join in political discussions online, but translating these activities into labor solidarity built on trust and a willingness to take economic or physical risk on another's behalf is exceedingly rare.

As a result, political action online has been largely relegated to electoral politics and tepid humanitarianism: it's been great for raising money for Tsunami relief and mobilizing voters, but pretty flaccid when it comes to wielding social movement power. (One exception is organizing around highly repressive regimes, where workers, students and others have successfully used mobile phones, twitter, etc. to organize escalating protests and free jailed activists.)

This tension around the pros and cons of online organizing has spurred a healthy debate inside and outside global labor and social movements. Earlier this year Eric Lee, the Godfather of the online labor movement posted an article entitled "How the Internet Makes Organizing Harder", which drew a flurry of responses. More recently community organizers in the US have been debating on DailyKos the merits of an article entitled "Real Change Happens Offline", written by Sally Kohn, campaign strategist at the Center for Community Change

GLS has been experimenting with online strategies for close to a decade now, largely spurred by our earlier work in the 1990's trying to figure out how to build and maintain a large but informal network of North American contingent workers. We come to the problem as longtime chroniclers of social movements interested in the underlying forces at work online, how these forces can help or hinder social movement building, and how they challenge existing union and social movement structures. Over the coming months we'll be tracking some of the latest strategies and tools of 2.0 social movements. This first post begins to layout out some basic trends and questions GLS has been tracking.

What's New and What's Not

Social networking is not new and not about technology. It's not about Myspace, Facebook, or YouTube; instead it's what everyone does every day: kindle and expand networks of friends, family, co-workers, etc. In the political context it's about finding and building communities of interest, linking common struggles, and acting collectively. Facebook and other online social networking tools are just a new way for people engage in this age-old activity.

But at the same time the online universe is not simply another place for people to congregate, circulate a petition, debate politics or mail out a newsletter. Nor is it simply a new technology like cable television -- merely bringing more channels into the home. Instead the web is increasingly looking like the invention of the printing press, which radically changed the lives of even those that could not read by spurring the protestant reformation and scientific revolution.

During just the last several years the internet has evolved from its first generation as a static information portal (e.g. websites) to what is now referred to as Web 2.0, marked by the explosion of user-generated and interactive content (Clay Shirky, author to Here Comes Everybody, has done some of the best work on the implications of Web 2.0 for organizations.) There are five reasons why this newly evolved electronic space is especially relevant to the future of the global social movements:

1. Group Formation: New social networking tools, ranging from Facebook and Twitter to email and listserves, make forming groups—and hopefully social movements—much easier. Every time labor organizers knock on doors, hold a community meeting or organize a protest the primary goal is to entice individuals into group activity; they hope to transform isolated actors with little social power into a powerful force for social change. The problem is that group formation has always been very hard to do.

What is new about tools like Facebook is that they make more varieties of group formation possible. Now, totally on their own, millions of people are finding others who care about the same things they do, whether it be around oyster farming, workplace complaints, or radical politics. What the web has revealed is that there were thousands of these latent groups that for hundreds of years were never able to form because it was too difficult for people to identify others with similar interests and too difficult for them to efficiently communicate when they did. So now even the most transient and marginalized sectors in society can potentially form support and sharing networks. Thousands from the homeless community, for example, have gathered online to share their stories and swap survival strategies, often posting from public libraries.

At their core labor and other social movements are about group formation, and now suddenly the tools exist to make it much easier to bring people together. In practice, the labor movement might begin helping workers access and learn how to use these new tools, and let them uncover their own latent groups---groups that may well not fit neatly into a narrow trade union agenda. Labor and social movement organizations might also spend more time trafficking where people are already gathering online, such as within the Obama social networks, and practice getting in the middle conversations and shifting debates.


2. Scale and amplification: With a single keystroke, social movements can now push information out to millions of people and lift up marginalized voices into national, and even global, spheres. But scale increasingly does not just mean trying to reach the whole world, especially as it has become increasingly difficult to break through the online noise. Scaling is also about surgically communicating with discreet sets of readers. Part of the success of the GLS blog is that rather than try to reach the global labor movement writ large, it targets a narrow subset of the movement that is grappling with long term, strategic questions of worker and class representation in the global economy. Two decades ago we could never have hoped to so quickly and cheaply carve out this global audience.

3. Interactivity: The web is not a one-way transmission belt like television; it's more akin to the telephone, allowing conversation, intimacy, and debate by tapping into the fundamental human desire for self-expression and shared communication. Net theorists like Clay Shirky argue that Web 2.0 represents "the largest increase in human expressive capability in history." Much of the power of labor and social movement organizations lie in their ability to allow those shut out of elite political activity to participate. With the internet encouraging this participatory tendency, social movements need to approach their technology platforms as more than just a new way to send out flyers and opinion pieces or run petition drives. They need to build freewheeling electronic spaces where workers and others can share, debate and collaborate.

4. Destruction of hierarchies: Elites have long controlled the broadcast tools – they have always owned both the printing press and distribution networks — which made them the gatekeepers of information flow, allowing them to frame the political debates and decide what is and what is not news. But new broadcast tools increasingly allow workers to publish and distribute their own news and begin redirecting information flows. The elites are terrified of this "mass amateuration" of broadcasting. The mass layoffs of journalists and the frantic fears of politicians who never know when a swarm of people might go on the attack are two recent examples of this erosion of the power of the "professional classes."

5. Cheapness and ease of tools: Labor and social movement organizations have been perennially under-resourced, and with the current financial crisis and global recession the situation will surely worsen. But at the same time with the advent of web-enabled mobile phones and $300 computers, cutting edge communication tools are becoming cheaper and more powerful, and as a result, quickly leveling the technological playing field. In South Africa for example, even though Internet penetration remains at around 10%, mobile phone penetration sits at 95%. (Eric Lee's recent parsing out the uses of Twitter to allow workers to communicate by mobile phone across borders and workplaces for free is a must-read for those tracking the online labor movement).
Social networking tools are also becoming easier and easier to use. Just in the last two years, people with little technical ability are now able to create websites, Facebook pages, YouTube videos, etc. We're drawing closer to the point where the majority of on-line tools are so simple that technical experts are irrelevant. The web is no longer the exclusive dominion of the young and highly educated, and as this trend continues it will allow social movements to cheaply and easily reach out to more and more working people.

What We Don't Know

These rapid changes raise more questions than they answer. Here are seven that we've been grappling with:

1. What does it mean if workers begin organizing on their own outside and without the help of traditional organizations? We don't know the ramifications for unions if truckers, for example, increasingly come together on-line to organize protests over gas price--as they did in April of this year--without ever attending a Teamster meeting or a receiving a house call from an organizer. Traditional union structures have already been outflanked by the global economy, now labor faces the challenge of workers acting collectively outside of trade union structures. This could offer fertile ground for trade unions and other social movement organizations or it might mean there are types of activities that are quickly becoming obsolete.

2. It's easy and cheap for organizations to bring people together into a swarm but what do you do with them then? Groups like MoveOn have perfected how to share information, fundraise and sign petitions. But outside the electoral arena, few have been successful in converting group interest into escalating political activity. Because of this people are joining and then quickly dropping out of social networks. Labor and social movement organizations need to keep experimenting with how to keep workers engaged and ways to encourage online activity from information sharing and debate to collaboration and collective action.

3. Will unions and social movement organizations be willing to cede control as workers use social networking tools to channel their own activities? The destruction of hierarchies online means that trade unions will face increasing pressure from workers to permit more rank and file debate and input. This is a healthy process and a long time in coming. If labor and other social movements are to embrace the dynamism of social networking sphere and move beyond simply posting opeds on Huffington Post written by union Presidents or NGO executive directors, they will have to cede significant control. Organizations that resist this trend will become increasingly irrelevant online and offline.

4. How do labor and social movement organizations address the dangers associated with online action? The majority of online tools and spaces are commercial ventures, and the transparent nature of web means that elites and bosses are always watching. Several Egyption bloggers were jailed last year after participating in calls for a general strike. Facebook recently closed the account of an SEIU affiliate who was trying to organize casino workers in Nova Scotia, Canada. As Eric Lee warns "Social networks in principle are excellent but something such as Facebook, for example can close down anything it wants. So I think unions need to have their own tools, websites and mailists." At the same time, there are legitimate concerns about the spread of online slander, "mobbing" of innocent victims (e.g. "swift boating"), false rumors and misinformation without ways to rebut. Social movements need to anticipate and respond quickly to racist, nationalist and other destructive forces converging online.

5. How do we track the demographics of who's online and who's not and what tools they are using? Some of the numbers on web usage are surprising. It's known, for example that Latino's in the US are offline in huge numbers but their cell phone use is skyrocketing just as mobile phones are increasingly web enabled. It's also known that poor and working class folks in the US are often trapped offline, but those that are online appear to be more interactive and engaged than other segments of the population. So for example, according to the PEW Research Center households making less than $50,000 a year are more likely put content (pictures, music, post comment in chatrooms, etc.) online than higher-income households. The demographics are changing fast; social movements need to be constantly reassessing assumptions about their target audience.

6. How do we present complex ideas online? We know that people take in information in a whole myriad of ways and weigh it differently depending on medium. On the web it's been difficult to figure out how to present complex ideas and synthesize large swaths of information electronically – blog posts work, long issue reports and white papers do not. The best model we have found for presenting and synthesizing a complex and evolving issue is Baseline.com, which has been tracking the global financial crisis.

7. How does offline and online social movement building fit together? We know it's essential but where and when to rely on face-to-face contact during an online campaign and vice-versa is still unknown. When, for example, do we call a virtual vs. a non-virtual protest; when is physical contact required to build lasting and deep solidarity vs. cheap and fast FaceBook or Twitter campaigns? The Obama campaign has broken new ground by fully integrating their online and offline activities. Each time a supporter interacts with the campaign data specialists create new layers for targeting that person by region, engagement and volunteer preferences. Then organizers use a myriad of tools--text messages, phone calls, house visits, etc.--to figure out how and where to plug supporters into the campaign structure. Labor and social movement organizations need to experiment with these new techniques but anticipate that online organizing will continue to be littered with failed experiments.


None of these questions will be answered overnight but it's in our interest to engage this new terrain and figure out how to use these swirling forces to our advantage.

So where to we go from here? This summer, encouraged by the success of their virtual strike, organizers launched "Union Island" on SecondLife, a space built to help the labor movement leverage new social networking tools, including how to create avatars, build more dynamic websites, as well swap tricks of the trade over a beer at the virtual bar.

Maybe we can all start by heading over to the bar for a virtual beer...

Brendan Smith

Permalink Reply by Orsan Senalp on December 8, 2010 at 22:40

Social Networking: Is Malcolm Gladwell Right That It's Useless for Social Change?

[This article is dedicated to the late Tim Costello, who taught us so much about social movements and organization. Original Posted on HuffingtonPost.com

An article called "Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted" by Malcolm Gladwell in the October 4, 2010 New Yorker poses an important question: What if anything is the potential contribution of web-based "social networking" to social movements and social change? The article's answer, drawing primarily on an account of the civil rights movement, is that social movements that are strong enough to impose change on powerful social forces require both strong ties among participants and hierarchical organizations - the opposite of the weak ties and unstructured equality provided by social networking websites.

Gladwell deserves credit for kicking off a discussion of this question, but that discussion needs to go far beyond the answers he provides, both in conceptual clarity and in historical perspective. This is a modest contribution to that discussion.

For starters, a bit of conceptual clarification. Social networking websites are not a form of organization at all; they are a means of communication. Comparing Twitter to the NAACP is like comparing a telephone to a PTA; they are not the same kind of thing, they don't perform the same kind of functions, and therefore their effectiveness or otherwise simply can't be compared.

There are other category problems as well. "Small Change" counterposes "networks" and "hierarchies." It conflates "strong ties" with "hierarchical" organizations. It denies that strong ties can occur as part of networks. These three conceptual presuppositions, which underlie the article's concrete historical analysis, deserve some serious reconsideration.

Economists and social scientists have traditionally divided organizations into "markets" and "hierarchies." Both coordinate multiple players, but in different ways. Markets are based on decentralized exchanges that lead to coordination by "feedback" from past transactions. (People raise or lower their prices based on how much demand there has been for what they are selling, leading in theory to the production of the right amount of different kinds of stuff.) Hierarchies -- for example armies and corporations -- are based on a centralized control structure that plans coordinated activity and then commands subordinates to implement their assigned pieces of it.

More recently, some interpreters have pointed out that there is a third form, which they have dubbed "networks." Networks coordinate by means of the sharing of information and voluntary mutual adjustment among participants. They are different from markets because their planning is proactive and based on knowledge of other participants' intentions and capabilities, rather than on feedback from past transactions. They are different from hierarchies because their decision-making is decentralized and voluntary rather than centralized and authoritative.

How do the historical experiences of the civil rights movement analyzed in "Small Change" look in the light of such a clarified set of categories? There has been a vast amount of historical research on the history of the civil rights movement over the past few years. Two points stand out. First, the visible actions like marches, sit-ins, and bus boycotts rested on a deep foundation of culture, social linkages, and accumulated experience of struggle in Black communities in the South. These connections, stretching over generations and diverse spheres of life, were the mulch from which the civil rights movement emerged -- or, perhaps more aptly, became visible to others on the outside.

These linkages can be appropriately described as local community networks -- means of coordinating action based in information sharing rather than on either on a market or a command hierarchy.

Far from being able to command the action of these local networks, national civil rights leaders and organizations were largely dependent on them. In general, local leaders made the decision of whether, for example, to bring Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) into town, and they were generally able to veto strategic decisions they did not agree with. They used the national leadership and organizations for their own purposes at least as much as the other way around. This picture represents anything but a hierarchy in which national leaders and organizations (or even local ones) were able to command participation the way it is done in an army, a corporation, or a similar "hierarchical organization."

Examining the Greensboro, N.C. lunch counter sit-in that touched off the sit-down wave of 1960, "Small Change" takes the personal "strong ties" among the initial Greensboro sit-downers as the key to their participation. Two were roommates and all had gone to the same high school, smuggled beer into their dorm room, remembered the murder of Emmett Till, the Montgomery bus boycott, and Little Rock. They discussed the idea of a Woolworth sit-in for a month. They were a "product" of the NAACP Youth Council (although "Small Change" doesn't even mention whether that organization played a role in the sit-in, let alone organized it.) They had close ties with the head of the local NAACP chapter. They had been briefed on previous sit-ins and attended "movement meetings in activist churches."

What social relations could be less hierarchical than this description? What could better fit the image of the dense social networks of a community in struggle? Would the results have been the same or better had an official of a civil rights organization come into town and tried to command those four students to go to Woolworth's and sit in?

"Small Change" similarly argues that such "strong ties" made the difference between volunteers who did and did not stay with the Mississippi Freedom Summer. The volunteers who stayed with Mississippi Freedom Summer "were far more likely than dropouts to have "close friends who were also going to Mississippi."

Such personal connections are undoubtedly important - but they are hardly the same thing as a hierarchy. The view that such strong ties contribute to the emergence of deep commitment is surely not the same as the claim that hierarchy is necessary to produce such commitment.

"Small Change" goes on to describe pre-Greensboro sit-ins that were formally organized by civil rights organizations and maintains that this argues against a "network" interpretation of the sit-down movement. But it doesn't raise the question of why these more formally organized sit-downs didn't spread and become a movement in the way that the Greensboro sit-in -- initiated by four high school freshmen who apparently were not even members of any organization at the time -- did.

"Small Change" describes the civil rights movement as "like a military campaign" that was "mounted with precision and discipline." Anybody who participated or has reviewed recent research on its history will likely find this description unfamiliar to say the least. Some of the SNCC kids from the Albany, Georgia campaign were even heard to say (perhaps over-deprecating their own strategic acumen): We had no idea what we were doing; we just kept jumping around until we landed on someone's toes and they hollered and that's how we found out who was really opposing us.

"Small Change" points out that "The NAACP was a centralized organization." True enough. But the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s came about explicitly as a break with the policies and domination of the NAACP, an attempt to break out from its hegemony. And the NAACP had a very ambiguous relationship, to say the least, to the direct action civil rights movement.

In the SCLC "Martin Luther King, Jr., was the unquestioned authority." Really? Nobody challenged the fact that he was the leader, but the massively researched biographies of King show that he was being challenged all the time on strategy and policy both by his lieutenants and by the local leadership of the movements he was brought in to "lead." Michael Honey's magnificent book Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign makes clear just how much authority King exercised over local leaders and other "followers" (authority: none; influence -- even that was pretty marginal a lot of the time).

According to "Small Change," the "black church" was a hierarchical organization in which the minister "usually exercised ultimate authority over the congregation. But there were scores of different black churches in each city. In any one, the minister might be able to exercise authority (though if parishioners didn't like what the minster did they could and did switch to other churches). But the idea that these churches collectively represented a unity with a single authority is doubtful. Certainly it does not assort well with historical research portraying the difficulties Martin Luther King, Jr. had holding together the different Montgomery churches during the bus boycott. Crucially, did black ministers have enough authority to order their parishioners to go to jail? Or did the commitment of movement participants come from something other than a command hierarchy?

The idea that the civil rights movement as a whole expressed some kind of unity of command is also dubious. The SCLC was formed because King was unable to win the black Baptist denominations to support his vision. SNCC kids derisively referred to Dr. King as "de Laud." The counter-examples could go on and on.

The capabilities "Small Change" attributes to hierarchies sometimes reach the level of the awesome. It maintains, for example that networks are unlike hierarchies in that they are "prone to conflict and error." Hierarchies are not "prone to conflict and error?"

"Small Change" points out that digital communication would have been of no use in Montgomery, Alabama, "a town where ninety-eight per cent of the black community could be reached every Sunday morning at church." An interesting point. But does that mean that committed social activism is simply impossible among people who do not have that kind of pre-existing face-to-face connection? If so, there must be no examples in which powerful, committed social movements have developed among people who don't see each other every weekend in church.

This brings us back to the role of social media. Gladwell is surely right when he says social media "are not a natural enemy of the status quo." But that is only the beginning of the discussion. The pertinent question is whether social media can contribute to the process of forming social movements and effective social action, not whether social media can substitute for that process. (A telephone system is not a PTA, but it can sure as heck be useful for getting a few hundred people out to confront the school board or vote in the school board election.)

The evidence here is pretty clear. Social networking websites can play and are playing an important role in finding and connecting people who are beginning to think and feel similar things. They can help participants deepen their understanding and form common perspectives. They can help inform those who use them of possible courses of action.

This doesn't in itself substitute for many of the other things movements need, and need to do. It does not in itself create the kinds of "strong ties" that help give a movement strength, although it may help people find others with whom they want to develop strong ties. (Compare computer-initiated dating, which in itself only connects potential partners but in fact has connected many people who thereupon partnered and married.)

Beyond group formation is the question of power. As Gladwell indicates, ten thousand people sending each other tweets doth not a revolution make, or even major social change. Whatever else, significant social change requires, as Gandhi put it, "noncooperation" with the status quo and a "matching of forces" with those who would maintain it. Social networking cannot in itself provide either of these. But it can be a powerful tool for making such expressions of power possible.

This is not the first time that the relation between social movements and new forms of communication has been considered. A once-influential study published in 1847 observed that workers were beginning to form "combinations"; to "club together in order to keep up the rate of wages"; and to found "permanent associations" to make provision beforehand for occasional revolts. The consequence was an "expanding union of the workers."

This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by Modern Industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes.

Maybe the role of telegraph and newspapers a century and two-thirds ago is irrelevant to the role of social networking media today. But maybe not.

GLS

Permalink Reply by Orsan Senalp on December 8, 2010 at 23:43

I have just posted two articles from Global Labour Strategies blog since they are highly relevant to the group's prospective goals and the discussion; they contain valuable arguments, facts and opinions from the GLS team on social networks, web 2.0, and labour movement's renewal and related items.

The invaluable efforts and contributions of the GLS team to the union movment's revival, recently evolved into The Labor Network for Sustainability which comes very close to our discussion object or our new project: a Social Network Union.

Ours however may be is the first real attempt to create truly, transnational, and transunion union body, that aims at breaking away with the hierarchy and overcoming clinical obstacles before geniune democracy and solidairty.

Labour Network for Sustainability is a great initiative, but it only aims at 'sustainibility' so on the defensive side. Does not go further and addresses great injustice and inequality problems of our time. It is not envisaged as a platform that would grow based on direct membership and provide space to members for participation.

Peter Hall Jones' and, may be his team's, have made great contribution to the New Unionism debate in general. The New Uninoism network is beased on membership principle, and it works as a social network. However it does not possess the capacity to act as an online social network. New Unionism Network therefore uses Unionbook in order to give voice to its members. Thanks to Unionbook idea and practice one more time. This move brought NUN project closer to our social network union idea.

However as Peter HJ confirms, NUN is not thought of a union model, that can operate as an alternative to what we have today. Or what is left after the crisis. NUN is limited to English speaking West but open to the rank and file. It is a very informative platform, makes big impulses on unionist's minds and hearts in the West and may be beyond.

So it is higly valuable to get the ideas and inputs from both New Unionism Network members and Peter as well as The Labour Network for Sustainibility team and participants.

What I would like to suggest as an opening proposition hat an online social network has an organisational potential that can only be utilized if you think it as a new model union, not only a industrial 'trade' union, but a mechanism that can aim real direct democracy and brining justice for who needs it trought thier and many others common work with the help of the net. Not only online but where ever members goes, just like a good software and hardware virus aims at curing the system. Therefore it should not be seen only as a complementary tool but a tool with its own future, a tool that can create real pressure to change for the existing unions. This means utilizing the syberspace via online social network but fertilizing it to and with the people on real life.

Permalink Reply by Orsan Senalp on December 29, 2010 at 23:10

"The Gaia hypothesis, Gaia theory or Gaia principle is an ecological hypothesis or theory proposing that the biosphere and the physical components of the Earth (atmosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere) are closely integrated to form a complex interacting system that maintains the climatic and biogeochemical conditions on Earth in a preferred homeorhesis. Originally proposed by James Lovelock as the earth feedback hypothesis,^[1] it was named the Gaia Hypothesis after the Greek primordial goddess of the Earth, at the suggestion of William Golding, Nobel prizewinner in literature and friend and neighbour of Lovelock.^[2] The hypothesis is frequently described as viewing the Earth as a single organism.^[3]"    

 

 

Permalink Reply by Orsan Senalp on December 29, 2010 at 23:26

Inspired from our first meeting with Peter Waterman, in Den Haag, that aimed to ground our prospective and utopic social network union experiment, and also from the Gaia Hypothesis, I have started an open space within Open WSF site and called it GAIA (Global Alliance for Immediate Alteration) / New Transnational Social Network Union to Crack Capitalism and Protect Life, Peace and Justice on Earth [The name is also experimental and as the rest of the space it is open to changes].  

 

Peter, I sent the minutes of our meeting tru Unionbook messaging to you, since I don't have the text saved could you please post it here, thanks for the inspiration.

 

Orsan Senalp said:

"The Gaia hypothesis, Gaia theory or Gaia principle is an ecological hypothesis or theory proposing that the biosphere and the physical components of the Earth (atmosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere) are closely integrated to form a complex interacting system that maintains the climatic and biogeochemical conditions on Earth in a preferred homeorhesis. Originally proposed by James Lovelock as the earth feedback hypothesis,^[1] it was named the Gaia Hypothesis after the Greek primordial goddess of the Earth, at the suggestion of William Golding, Nobel prizewinner in literature and friend and neighbour of Lovelock.^[2] The hypothesis is frequently described as viewing the Earth as a single organism.^[3]"    

 

 

Permalink Reply by Orsan Senalp on January 3, 2011 at 0:11

I would like to encourage all the members of Unionbook and the Social Network Unionism to sign in Open World Social Forum site and join the first experiment of its kind.      

GAIA (Global Alliance for Immediate Alteration) / New Transnational... experiment has begun with 2001 and has already two comrades. 

GAIA Union provides an open space, a social network that is free to join and free to modify, as it works with wiki principle.

Soon we are going to put content on the site to start working on: such as principles, objectives, demands, means, slogans, campign ideas, so on so fort, for GAIA.

We are looking forward comrades who would join us and volunteraly contribute to these initial steps that are potentially historical for the international labor movement!

 

 

Permalink Reply by Orsan Senalp on July 6, 2011 at 14:43

GAIA calls for a global strike for 4 hours work day starting 11 nov 2011, 11:11 am!

 

#Real Democracy is a very clear and strong demand. However it needs to be accompanied with a strong call for globally accepted 4 Hour Work Day as a more realistic response to the crisis of capital ]http://manifestoofthe21stcentury.blogspot.com/].

This would allow us to push the anonymous and globally spreading 'take the square' and 'real democracy, yes!' movements [http://takethesquare.net/] that are building on the meme of Tahrir en Puerto del  sol squares forward!     

In order to harmonize rising core and common demands against the global capitalist system, its global crisis and for a real democracy across the world, as GAIA peerage, we are intended to reply the call for a year long p2p dissent. 

Our strategy would be as follows:  

- Pushing established trade unions to mobilize as well as encouraging other forces, movements, activists and hactivists to link their actions, strikes, hacks around the several shared key demands, which every forces would subscribe themselves without thinking. 

Immediate implementation of 4 hour work day, free and open internet, decommodification of the commons and public/social services, a radical decrease of carbon emission globally, direct access to policy making for everybody are some of these core demands we can hold on altogether. 

- Since they won't give these demands immediately, the best way to move forward would be following what the Italian water justice movement have been doing: We need to create widest alliancess on common  issues and invite people's assembles to write universal laws on their respective fields, i.e. by using wiki processes. Then we will need the year long dissent, to push the people's p2p laws forward transnationally and peacefully .

Please spread the word! and join forces at GAIA: http://openfsm.net/projects/gaia/summary

Hasta la victoria!

Permalink Reply by Orsan Senalp on July 19, 2011 at 16:30

We are organising a peerage base for the new peer to peer social network union GAIA – Global Alliance for Immediate Alteration. Join Us!


If you are outraged because you are unemployed, or you have precarious position in the ‘labour market’, and you feel injustice everywhere; If you want to do something about it for your self and others, join us, join the GAIA peerage. And invite other to do so!

If you think the state to which you are paying a lot of taxes abandons you, and you think traditional unions, political parties and civil society organisations are not representing your interest and wishes properly, join the GAIA peerage!

In order to invent and build direct democratic peer to peer governance and protect, not only your self but also others’ interest by self representation join your force with us!

Even if you are a member of another network, union, or movement you can join us! You do not leave your memberships or other identities! This is better for GAIA peerage because in this way you can help us to link many to each other and in to one.

We do not have a manifesto or list of principles! In order to join us you do not have to subscribe to something or promise anything.

There is no membership to GAIA, neither membership fee. Joinin GAIA Union is free.

GAIA is a union also for 'free labour' peer producers can join GAIA to express their interest.

With your contribution, what ever it might be, we can crack the old parasitic and unjust greed based private system down, and can create a safe, beautiful, peaceful, and just life on earth together!

Lets join and help us to create a peer to peer, transnational organised network of people who need to work for their life, and who do not want to consume and possess but instead to produce and build a future based on the commons; who do not want to leave on the edge but realise them selves freely.

Unite with others while keeping your autonomy, put in to the synergy and increase your energy.

Join us, join GAIA, and invite others!

All for one, one for all!

http://www.facebook.com/pa​ges/GAIA-UNION-Global-Alli​ance-for-Immediate-Alterat​ion/153324248063506?sk=inf​o

http://openfsm.net/project​s/gaia/summary