UnionBook

It's that time of year again – time for the Labour Website of the Year competition.

This is a competition that LabourStart has run every year since 1998.

As trade union use of the Internet grows, the competition grows as well.

This year, we asked our readers to nominate their favorite union websites. You nominated 170 sites – nearly twice as many as the year before.

We then asked our volunteer correspondents to vote for the best ones from that list, and we now have a short-list of 12 sites – from the USA, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Palestine, and Europe.

Today it's your turn to pick the best of those 12. Please go here to cast your vote:

http://www.labourstart.org/lwsoty/2009/

Please check out the sites that you may never have visited before. There are some fantastic resources here including three sites that have already won the website of the year competition in the past.

Voting ends on 5 February 2009.

Please encourage your friends and co-workers to vote as well. (But remember, you can only vote once!)

Trade unionists talk a lot about organising, but how well organised are we ourselves?

I've tried lots of tools over the years with the goal of being better organised, including personal digital assistants (PDAs), PC-based software, and most recently web-based tools.

Most recently, I've gotten hooked by a fantastic service called Highrise

Highrise is what one user calls a “Rolodex on steroids”. At its core is a contact manager. But it is also a task manager too, and an events calendar.

It's also completely free of charge, if you choose the simplest option. Otherwise, you pay a small monthly fee.

Because it's web-based, you don't need to be on your own computer to use it. Any Internet-connected device will do. Groups of individuals can share the same Highrise account, each one maintaining the information and updating it.

Highrise has a tremendous number of useful features, including the ability to add notes and entire documents to each of your contacts. Because of this, when you phone someone, you can have their details, notes about them, a record of what you previously discussed and much more in front of you on a single screen.

You can tag your contacts in an infinite number of ways, and sort and display them as you wish. You can export your data, or any part of it, to a spreadsheet.

The possibilities for trade union organisers should be obvious.

Union organisers can use Highrise to record all contacts, to note who has joined and what they've agreed to do, and who are potential members. Once a union exists in the workplace, Highrise could be used to maintain membership records and details of contacts between members and the union.

I'm sure there are loads of expensive systems out there which do the same thing. And I'm sure that people have hacked together ways to do much of this on an Excel spreadsheet too.

But to be able to access all your contacts from any Internet-connected device (including your cellphone) – that's extraordinary.

Highrise was not designed to be an organising tool. It's part of a suite of applications offered by a company which is probably the world's leader in web-based software, 37Signals. This company has written the book – literally – on how to design web-based software.

I think that any trade unionist who tries Highrise will instantly recognise the potential.

I've just been sent this, forwarded on by the Stop the War Coalition in the UK:

Facebook today deleted an event set up by the Stop the War Coalition publicising the 2nd national demonstration against Israel's attacks on Gaza, with no explanation. Around 20,000 people had been sent invites to this event.

One more reason why need a social network designed by and for trade unionists, which is what UnionBook aims to be.

With a public launch only days away, we've fixed a few key things:

The site administrators can now approve users who did not confirm their memberships by email.  This is a major problem, as 150 of the first 530 users did not succeed in doing this themselves.

We've upgraded to Elgg 1.2, the latest version.

The forms mod has been fixed, so when - for example - you submit a bug, you don't see rubbish code.

We're working on raising the profile of your union membership, so this will appear throughout the site.

More soon.