If you already have an account on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo or any other social network, we're not suggesting that this is a replacement.  But we feel that UnionBook fills a void - a need for trade unionists to have a platform that we control, that is advertising-free and that respects our privacy.

Facebook, for example, does none of those things.  Because we don't control it -- Facebook is, after all, a profit-making business -- any groups, causes or events that we create can be deleted by the company without any right of appeal.  And this has already happened. 

If you're too active doing the kind of networking that we trade unionists do all the time -- recruiting friends, sending out messages, and so on -- Facebook can blacklist you and close your account.  This has already happened to a number of union activists.

UnionBook, on the other hand, belongs to us.  It's been designed specifically to meet the needs of trade unionists.  It aims to feature most of the tools we use on Facebook -- and more. 

As it's an open source system (running ELGG) we can customize it as much as we want.

For example, you can create blogs here.  UnionBook offers free blogs to every trade union member, every branch, every shop steward and every union committee.

You can create groups and the groups themselves can have blogs, documents and discussion forums of their own.  In other words, mini-websites.  And highly interactive ones at that.

At the moment we're beta-testing this, so what we really need is for people to sign up and try it out.  Let us know what works and what doesn't, what's missing and what's hard to understand.  We're going to try to fix everything we can before our public launch in early 2009.

To sign up to the site, click here.

Send any questions to Eric Lee.

Thanks!