Last year, the winning site belonged to Canada's largest union, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), an excellent site based on open source software tools. It competed with 467 other sites to win the competition. Over 5,500 trade unionists participated in the voting. Three British sites made the top ten (30KFirePay – a firefighters' site, the CWU and Usdaw, in that order). In the previous year, Unison's website made the top five, as did 30KFirePay.

As recently as four years ago, only 300 votes were cast, and in 1997, when the competition began, you could comfortably fit all the voters into a London taxi. These numbers give a sense of the tremendous expansion of trade union use of the net in the last few years.

The last time a British site won the competition was in 2001 when Hazards, the health and safety magazine and website, won. Another UK union, the GPMU (now part of Amicus) won the award in 1998. Other winners have been unions in the USA and Australia.

This year there are two notable changes to the process. First of all, voting has begun much earlier in order to allow Australians and others in the southern hemisphere to cast their votes before the onset of their summer holidays. The deadline for voting has been extended until 15 January 2005. Second, in addition to the popular vote, a special panel of experts, assembled from around the world, will also pick their favourite union website. The winner will be announced on 16 January.

There's an official list of nominated sites but any union website can enter the competition and “write-in” votes are allowed. To cast your vote or to find out who won, visit the site:

http://www.labourstart.org/lwsoty/