Eric Lee

If I were the Israeli Prime Minister (and I'm not) I'd give the following speech next week at the peace conference in Annapolis. Here's what I'd say:

Enough is enough. Let's end this thing right here, right now.

To the Palestinians, I'll say yes to practically everything you say. You don't want any more roadblocks in the West Bank? Done. We'll take them down. You want your prisoners released from our jails? Here you go -- take them. You want us to withdraw to the 1967 borders? No problem -- but you know that realistically we're going to want to tinker a bit with the borders so that we keep some of the older, larger settlements but you get an equal amount of Israeli land. But if you really want to return to the 1967 borders, we can do that too. You want to share Jerusalem with us? Be our guest; feel free to put your capital somewhere in East Jerusalem. And when you declare your state, we'll the first country to recognize you, and we look forward to welcoming the first Palestinian ambassador in our capital.

What do we want in return? From you - nothing. Of course you're expected to promise to end terrorism, and I'm sure you'll do your best. What we want is not something that you can provide and I'll come to that in a moment.

To the Syrians, welcome back to the peace process. Would you like your Golan back? You can have it. We know that in 1967, when you held the entire Golan, our army cut through it like a hot knife through butter. It was hardly an obstacle for us. In 1973, when we held it, your army swept through it as if we weren't there. So much for a "natural line of defense" for either one of us. You can have it all in exchange for a peace treaty -- even though we know at best we'll get a cold peace out of you.

To the Saudis, thanks for the peace plan. It's just what Israel used to call for back in the good old days, 40 years ago. You could have had it all then -- the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Golan were all in your hands. All we wanted was recognition -- which you wouldn't give us. Now you're offering it in return for us going back 40 years. Consider it done. We have no problem with that. It's what we always wanted.

To the Israelis, I know what you're thinking. Is he insane? Is he giving back everything in exchange for promises from regimes which have waged war on us for decades? Their promises mean nothing. And I say: you're right.

Because in exchange for giving back all of the West Bank, and freeing the Palestinian prisoners, and recognizing a Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem, and giving the Syrians the Golan back, I would be insane to ask for nothing.

That's not what I'm doing. I don't want anything from Abbas and Assad -- because they cannot give us what we need.

Here is what I do want, and it's a precondition for our signing any agreement:

I want the United States to guarantee, today, Israel's membership in Nato. I want permanent Nato bases with a significant commitment of forces on Israeli soil. I want Israel's sovereignty guaranteed by the Atlantic alliance and I want Israel to be able to invoke Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty which specificies that "an armed attack against one or more of them ... shall be considered an attack against them all."

Collective security worked for you and it will work for us too. Let us into Nato and we can end this hundred-year war right here, right now.

P.S. Thank you to Nato for making the Treaty available in all the key European languages and also in Hebrew and Arabic. It's almost like an invitation, isn't it?

Posted by Eric Lee at 02:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

The decision by the TUC to launch a slick new website in Polish (http://www.pracawbrytanii.eu/) represents a huge step forward.

According to National Insurance figures, there are over 223,000 Polish workers resident in the UK today. Probably only a tiny fraction of them are union members – making them a major target for unions that want to grow. But Poles are not the only migrant workers in the UK and Polish is not the only language spoken by migrant workers in this country.

In 2006-7 alone, over 700,000 migrant workers applied for national insurance numbers in the UK. Poles were the largest group, but 29,000 Slovakians also arrived, as did 24,000 Lithuanians. Another 145,000 came from Asia and the Middle East – with the largest groups coming from India and Pakistan.

If unions want to reach out to those hundreds of thousands of unorganised workers, they are going to need to use the Internet as never before – because many of those workers are online. They stay in touch with friends and family back home using email and the web.

Creating the TUC's website in Polish was no doubt a big challenge. Any attempt to create similar sites in the languages spoken by the more than 400,000 migrant workers who are not Polish would be hugely expensive.

But this need not be the case. There are examples of multilingual websites in the trade union movement, sometimes done practically for free. An outstanding one is LabourStart, which works in 17 languages.

It has done so by applying three rules.

First, website design must be modular, so that new languages can easily be “plugged in” to an existing web architecture. Sites cannot be designed from scratch for each new language.

Second, websites in different languages are not going to be translations of the English. They'll need to be given a large degree of autonomy if they are to work.

Third, the hundreds of thousands of workers now living in Britain whose native languages may be Portuguese, or Slovak, or Urdu, have as much of an interest in there being trade union media in their languages as unions do. Among them will be many who are willing to volunteer to write and to translate.

The launch of the TUC's Polish website needs to be understood for what it really is – a big step forward, but a first step only.

Posted by Eric Lee at 10:11 AM | Permalink

Like many of you, I get hundreds of email messages every week and have long been following discussions in books and on the web of how to keep an inbox under control. I like many of the ideas from David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) which does focus on emptying a physical or virtual inbox fairly quickly.

But I found that it was tricky to do this with the Thunderbird email client for Linux. There were two things I wanted to do and neither one worked. This morning, I found a one-click solution for both problems and have managed to bring my Inbox down to 0 in a fairly short period of time.

The first problem was that I wanted to stop automatic retrievals of emails while I'm working. I feel like Sisyphus when I answer five emails only to have ten more come in. I buy the argument made by many personal productivity gurus that you should set aside certain times -- possibly once a day -- to download and read your emails. Otherwise you're constantly interrupted.

But when I went into Thunderbird's menus and tried to set them up to not download my emails at various intervals, the changes didn't take hold. (I used Edit | Account settings; I am running version 2.0.0.6 (20071022) - the lastest version there is.)

There seemed to be no way to get Thunderbird to remember how to do this.

The second problem -- and this is one I spent some time Googling today -- is that Thunderbird doesn't have an option to send all messages I've written later rather than now.

Why would I want to do this? Because sometimes, the sending of a message can take 10, 20 or 30 seconds if there's any delay in connecting to my SMTP server, or if I've attached anything. I hate sitting and staring at a screen for upwards of half a minute waiting for an email to be sent. I prefer to send them in batches.

There are various plugins that are supposed to help with this, but the one I tried didn't work in my version of Thunderbird.

There is the option of not clicking on the Send button, but of going into the menu and selecting "Send Later", but as one who has gotten used to clicking on the big Send button, I rarely remember to do this.

What I needed was a big "Send Later" option (without a send now option in sight) and no interruptions from incoming emails.

And I found it -- undocumented -- so I'm telling you here:

In Thunderbird, under the File menu, click on 'Offline'.

That's it, problem solved.

I worked offline all morning, managed to get through my entire inbox without interruptions, moved things that take more than two minutes to do into my task list (using J-Pilot), and sent off all the messages in a batch when done.

Posted by Eric Lee at 10:05 AM | Permalink

The new technology, they said, was going to transform the Internet forever. Instead of you having to go online and “pull” web pages to your browser, it would 'push' pages to you. In fact, it was making the web browser itself obsolete. It was such an amazing thing that Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (the owners of Fox News) offered $450 million to buy the company. And companies, media outlets, even unions were told – you'd better get on board or you'll be left behind.

Some of you may recognize the story I'm telling – it describes something called PointCast, which most of you will never have heard of. But it, and its so-called “push technology” were the next big thing a decade ago.

Most of you will never have heard of it because like so many next big things, it fell as quickly as it rose, and its massive overvaluation turned out to be a harbinger of things to come. Three years later the dotcom bubble burst and PointCast was never heard from again.

A year after PointCast peaked, another company – an Israeli startup called Mirabilis – had developed the next next big thing. America Online (now Time Warner) snapped up the company for a mere $407 million in 1998 and its four young owners could now retire as millionaires.

Never heard of Mirabilis? Maybe you've heard of its sole product – an instant messaging client called ICQ. Or maybe not. Today ICQ is one of dozens of such products and others (such as MSN Messenger, Jabber or even Skype) seem far more popular. I wonder if anyone reading this article uses ICQ. I know that I haven't for several years.

The stories of PointCast and ICQ should be a warning to those who are willing to jump on any bandwagon and advocate the adoption of every shiny new thing on the Internet -- or else face the danger of falling behind.

There's a much more recent example that may be more familiar to you. A couple of years ago, the next big thing on the Internet was the social networking site MySpace. This time, Rupert Murdoch's company did get its hands on it, and purchased MySpace for $580 million in 2005. Shortly thereafter, the site lost much of its lustre as it became increasingly to be seen as just another arm of Murdoch's evil empire. Today MySpace is no longer seen by anyone as being particularly “cool”.

In 2005, MySpace was the next big thing. If you were serious about using the Internet, if you wanted to reach out to millions of people, you absolutely needed to be there. But not anymore.

Now it's almost 2008 and there are even more bandwagons to jump on. The latest is Facebook. Unions are being told that they need a presence on Facebook or else no one will know they exist. They need to use Facebook to mobilize thousands of people, to send a strong message to companies and governments, to grow their ranks, to make unions seem relevant to young people.

What a fantastic tool – it allows you to mobilize people online. But wait a minute – isn't this something we've been doing with websites since day one?

It is, but here's the difference. Let's say I set up a group on Facebook to tell the Burmese government to stop crushing democracy. I'll get tens of thousands of people to sign up to join my group. And I'll announce – we've got a giant Facebook group. We've got all these committed people. We're practically a mass movement.

But hang on – in what sense is a Facebook group a “group”? How does it differ from a simple online petition? The answer to the latter question is that it doesn't differ – it's just another way of doing an online petition. A worse way.

If I set up my online campaign on Facebook I can, in theory, email all members of my group. Not really, though. What I can do is to send them messages through Facebook – not to their actual email addresses, but force them to logon to Facebook to read my message. Even if they do this, it adds an additional couple of steps for them to follow.

If my Facebook group is over 1,000 names, I can't email them – and our experience has been that even with groups of under 1,000 names, the email doesn't always seem to work.

What you're doing by outsourcing your campaigning to Facebook is growing their company, giving them direct access to your supporters and members. What's the alternative? Do-it-yourself online campaigns where you retain the information on who has sent off protest messages.

LabourStart has campaigned this way for years. Every time we do a campaign, we collect the emails, names and unions of participants. If they've given us permission, we've added them to our mailing list and they receive our weekly email newsletter. Our list has grown from 3,000 names five years ago to 51,000 names today due to these campaigns.

Imagine if Facebook had existed five years ago and if we had tried to campaign using it. We wouldn't have a mailing list today and we certainly wouldn't be able to send out more than 50,000 emails a week.

Facebook is a poor replacement for a real online campaigning strategy for unions. And it makes us vulnerable to the whims of those who own the company. Last month, Microsoft invested $246 million in Facebook. It sees Facebook the same way that Murdoch saw MySpace (or PointCast) – as a way to make money.

And unions that have tried to use Facebook have not always had such great experiences. Earlier this year, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) tried to organize casino workers in Nova Scotia, Canada. They used Facebook and were shocked to find that their Facebook account had been closed. When they asked for an explanation, they were told that they were an organization, not an individual, and weren't allowed to have an account. (They replied that companies were allowed to have Facebook accounts, but this had no effect.)

A union in South Korea using a similar system was engaged in an organizing campaign collecting details of potential members all of which was lost when the company decided to shut them down.

The lesson I learn from all this is that the best tools are the ones we wield ourselves – and that the best way for unions to campaign online is not to jump on the latest bandwagon, but to spend the time, effort and money to create powerful online campaigning systems ourselves.

Posted by Eric Lee at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)