the guy by the door …

We DO have an online HUCTW election announcement. I still remember the summer of 2001. It was Friday evening I came home to find the notice of the contract ratification election for the FOLLOWING TUESDAY! That meant ONE DAY to campaign! So we’ve made some progress to a more open Union. Did my nudging help? After the 2001 contract election, it was more than a year before the full text of the contract was made available to the members. In fact, the election for officers was held before the full contract was shown to the membership. There was no informed discussion of just how well the officers had done before the election. Hopefully this time around we can remedy that as well.

Nominations were closed on Tuesday. Hopefully the candidate list will appear on the website soon. I am running for Union Representative in the College Library and Executive Board from the FAS Arts Region. Laura Johnson has also declared for this position. I think her three issues are good ones, but I would like to be a little more specific [as well as add some issues.]

The HUCTW website [and for that matter the OpenHUCTW website] are both broadcast style. The few [I’ll quietly avoid the adjectives ‘brave’ and ‘proud’] talking to the multitudes – top-down or Read-Only culture as Larry Lessig says. A Union should be bottom-up, many-to-many, or Read/Write culture in Lessig’s terms. We have, after 5 years achieved a Web 1.0 website, but there is abundant Web 2.0 technology available. The exact choice depends on knowing our membership. Personally I find Wiki’s as in Wikipedia an encouraging technology. For example, if you open my Wikipedia user page and the accompanying “edit this page” entry, you can flip between the presentation and the markup that generates it. You don’t actually have to know wiki markup to edit. Find something that does what you want and copy it. Go ahead! Try it! Leave me a message! I The system keeps ALL the backup copies!

[This by the way, is step one in bringing flexibility to the workplace, learning from each other. ]

So I have made quite a few edits, but I don’t actually know wiki markup. I have to admit though that I have had a lot of years of experience with software, so I may not understand how hard it is for others.

If that’s the case, we could use a slightly older technology – the discussion forum. It is not harder than e-mail and it has the advantage that all the different contributions are in one place rather than sprinkled through your inbox. But, this summer at Wikimania2006,a prototype of Wysiwiki was presented. You don’t need to know markup at all. It’s like Micro$oft Word where “What You See Is What You Get” except it makes wiki pages rather than printed documents.

I’ll regale you with the events of 2004 tomorrow including the raise that was not a raise and why Donene thinks none of y’all should burden your pretty little minds with the Consumer Price Index.
-r