Eric Lee

This article first appeared in Labour Research magazine.
In the course of the last decade, two colleagues of mine — both senior trade unionists — have suffered catastrophic losses of data. One lost his address book and calendar when his hand-held device died. The other lost all his handheld’s calendar entries when he synced the device to his desktop PC, which had contracted a virus, thereby wiping out what was on the handheld.
There are two important lessons I draw from these experiences.
First of all, backups are essential — but not in the way we used to do them.
And second, use of open source operating systems is no longer a luxury for the geeks.

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This article appears in the current issue of Labour Research.
To emphasize the importance of email, I used to tell unions that given the choice between a great website and a list of all members’ email addresses, choose the latter. I still believe that email is the most powerful tool we have and now, thanks to a new service called Posterous, email lists can be the starting point of a multi-platform net-based campaign.

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