I haven’t done a careful academic study of this, but it seems to me that few unions in Britain offer more opportunities for members to express themselves online than Napo — the union for family court and probation staff. Napo is a small union and was a late-comer to setting up a website. But its members have embraced the technology and are constantly inventing new ways of using the web for discussion.

Napo was one of the first British unions to feature a weblog and its General Secretary, Judy McKnight, has faithfully kept hers up to date for several years now. It’s a good thing in and of itself for a trade union general secretary to use the web to communicate with members. Blogs offer members the chance to talk back, and members often do. At the annual Napo conference, it has now become a tradition to offer a special conference blog written by officers. Members can comment there as well. A year ago, Napo relaunched its discussion forum — and as of last count, some 1,300 messages have been posted by members. Often, several “conversations” take place at the same time in these forums. And as if that were not enough, at the union’s AGM in mid-October 2005, all 37 branches got weblogs of their own, each allowing members to comment on stories posted.
The experience has not been pain-free — and the union is learning all the time.
The original discussion forums required a password to ensure that only members could use them. The problem was, no one could remember the password. Very few participated and the forums were dormant and uninteresting. When Napo decided to get rid of the password, and highlighted this fact on its front page, the forums came alive.
A more serious difficulty has been coping with comment spam. This is a bit like the email spam we all have to deal with, except that instead of appearing in your inbox, this spam appears as comments on your weblog. Fortunately, the latest version of the blogging software Napo uses takes care of this — but until now, it has been a real headache.
Another issue to deal with is people who deliberately use trade union forums to attack unions. Even little Napo has its enemies and they were quick to use the forums to attempt to disrupt the union’s work. In extreme cases, passwords are being reintroduced as necessary to exclude these people and make forums useful again.
A final problem is the Wild West character of the web itself. Last year, in the middle of its annual conference, the Napo website (and many others at the same time) were brought down by a vicious hacker attack. It took days to recover. Such attacks might happen again, but the union is better prepared now.