The Cyberunions Podcast: Episode five

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

 

Posted in Creative Commons, Podcast.

Marxist. Socialist & labor movement organizer. Boston DSA Labor he/him
https://rfs.dsausa.org/
Bread & Roses Caucus in #DSA
https://breadandrosesdsa.org/
#DemocraticSocialist
https://socialistcall.com/
#RankAndFile
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2 Comments

  1. 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.

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