The wiki and Creative Commons rant
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Show notes
Intro
- Stephen’s trip to Guatemala
- Flattr is crowdsourced microfinance
- If you like the show, please Flattr us
3:06 Sharing good practice – tribalism vs pluralism
- The SEIU union call centre experience
- It didn’t work – this example needs to be shared, not hidden
- It failed because it was a top down strategy that ignored feedback from below
- Call centres are part of a failed servicing strategy – we need to return to an organising model
- Expensive techno fixes are a bad idea – be strategic with resources and share good practice
10:00 Creative Commons – a great way to license and share content
- You can choose how you want your work licensed – some rights reserved
- Creative commons creates a legal framework to protect the commons
- We’ve had hundreds of years of privatisation of the commons – now we are seeing the enclosure of the digital commons
- Cyberunions is Creative Commons licensed – help yourself to our content, as long as you say where you got it
- We don’t think unions should use copyright – it’s a dated and regressive economic mode
15:00 Tools – using wikis to share good practice
- Can unions share their research into corporations?
- Wouldn’t a union wiki be a good idea – an ideas repository for union researchers?
- Develop an online international resource on fighting the same company in different locations
- Document successful and unsuccessful campaign strategies with critical examination of what failed to work
- We should open source the production of ideas too – an open source research process
- Stephen’s wiki rant
- Start by using Wikipedia – add useful content to the Organized Labor portal
- Do some work – make sure the union pages on wikipedia are good quality
- National unions can also create their own wikis using MediaWiki – these can be private and password protected if necessary
- Too much industrial relations material is hidden behind the paywall in expensive journals
- The Open Courseware Consortium takes a Creative Commons approach to education
I really like the idea of an industrial wiki for research, could be a great shared project between different unions, a great aide to organising and it would be information that the companies already have so secrecy wouldn’t be an issue.
That is great to hear! It has been an idea for quite some time, but for the past couple of years I have been far from the research field to continue to develop the idea. Much like social networking there is a need to get the researchers and members interconnected to build a solidarity research network. Could easily be done with a private status.net account to just to get the communication flow going.