Integrating On-line and Off-line Organising - A Case Study

A recent conference of NZEI school support staff union members led to an opportunity to intergrate some on and off-line organising. The conference was to have a professionally focused ICT workshop but I had the opportunity to discuss this with some conference organising committee members at a union leadership development course. They decided instead to focus the workshop on using the union's on-line networking and campaigning sites. Intitally they asked me to run the workshop but as I was unable I decided to look for a member who could run it. That proved fairly easy as all I had to do was look at the site and see who have been active and had engagaed in a number of different ways. One local member, Linda, stood out. I approached her about running the workshop and after she had agreed I worked with her on the workshop content.

Here are a couple of photos of the conference workshop.

The venue suffered from dodgy internet but Linda ran the workshop successfully resulting in new members signing up and a few of these people quickly adding content and comment. Linda asked all of the workshop participants to agree to an on-line task and because she has met these peole she is going to follow up with them.

Here's an email I got from Linda following the workshop.

Union Member Activity on Ning

NZEI is the union for school support staff in New Zealand, people like school office staff, teacher aides, librarians etc. Many of these people are very poorly paid and have limited job security, facing cuts to hours or being laid off if wages are increased. NZEI has mounted a Fair Deal campaign for support staff. A key focus of the campaign is development of member leadership and activism. This represents a considerable shift in the way the union has worked in the past - the focus on member driven activity is exciting, and challenging.

As part of the campaign a Fair Deal Ning has been set up. There is some staff input - this was particularly important at the beginning to get the ball rolling but now the bulk of the Ning members are union members. The site had a real boost when support staff participated in a day of action meaning there were plenty of photos and video to add. The focus of current comments is around support for the negotiation team bargaining the support staff collective agreement. Letting members have their head and speak out without carefully shaping the message is something very new for NZEI and is a welcome development.

I see the staff role as bring the Ning to the attention of members and showing them how to use it. It will interesting to see if the momentum can be maintained. I would be interested in hearing of other examples of unions using Nings or other similar sites and particularly the role of union staff with these.

Ning Ning

I was recently introduced to Ning through a community project I'm involved with. Ning is a free on-line platform for blogging and social networking. It has all the blog posting features that you'll be familiar with but combines these with a membership facility. Members can communicate directly with each other through comments, or groups can be formed where discussions can be held. The basic platform is very flexible and you can easily introduce a number of widgets and features. There is also the option to pay for additional features such as hosting on your own domain name, removing the google ads etc.

What I like about Ning is that the discussion and interaction elements are to the fore-front - much more so than on a blog. I've been looking around for an on-line platform that is about more than just reporting and would lend itself to collective engagement and I'm quite impressed with Ning so far.

I decided to take a look and see whether unions had been picking up on Ning (there's a Ning search facility). Through that I came across UnionSocialMedia.org, a network for people who want their "union to make better use of new media and communications tools". I've joined up and you'll find a badge on the sidebar if you're interested. Thee is currently a really interesting discussion about the potential of twitter for union organising and activity.

What About Social Networking?

There are lots of really popular social networking sites that lend themselves to collective participation and networking but many union attempts have fallen flat. Here is an introduction to social networking.



There is now also a specific union social networking site - Unionbook