People don’t use forums anymore. Union organizing requires big numbers and being comfortable with being visible.

The URL shortener for sure could be addressed and I invite you to join and contribute to improve that part of the stack. Nonetheless, TWC is not a hacker space or a space for tech experts. You need to use the tools people already use and meet them where they are at. Using niche tools people are not familiar with introduces friction and barriers, that filter out people without tech skills, or without the attention and time to learn a new tool and incorporate it in their routines. Most tech workers are not programmers, remember that. Also people who are too privacy-focused and tech-focused tend to be bad organizers: union organizing implies risks and exposure, and you have to be comfortable with that, while privacy-focused people want to minimize individual risk by staying hidden. For sure privacy of your communication from the employer or the government plays an important role, because it might give sensitive information to your enemy, but if retaining privacy prevents you from having impact, it’s pointless to even start.

I’m part of TWC and the organization of this call and I’m Italian. There are different timezones but it’s obviously hard to include all of them. Including UTC wouldn’t help most people.

The very fact that there are two events for two distinct timezones doesn’t suggest there’s an attempt to reach out to a bigger crowd?

Because self-hosting adds complexity and friction, something that impact-oriented organizations might not be able to afford. TWC uses self hosting on more sensitive data anyway, just not on these tools.

The Global chapter of Tech Workers Coalition

The Session A time zone is good for Europeans too. Session B I guess could work for East Asia.

Why do you see this as USA-only?

yeah, it’s quite big, because in a way it’s the biggest win so far for the BDS in American tech.

I wrote about this topic too, if you’re interested: https://write.as/conjure-utopia/the-verbose-story-of-how-i-left-the-tech-industry-and-started-washing-miso-jars

I didn’t mention some other systems, but for bigger campaigns ActionNetwork is one of the most used tools and has a lot of integrations, for instance with N8N. I do run some systems with ActionNetwork, mostly for newsletters. The thing of using N8N as a glue layer is that you can integrate with more specialized tools if the need arises, maintaining your custom systems for more niche cases.

I don’t use mastodon exactly because I don’t want to put in the labor of figuring out what content to consume. I want to be in control of the logic, but the machine should be doing it. The fediverse fails because it thinks people who want control over their feed are fine with not putting in any labor at all, basically conceding to big platforms that the only way to customize a feed is in an exploitative, invasive way, which is obviously bullshit.

the fediverse is microscopic and the people you want to get involved politically probably stay away from it.

passive users don’t care about suppression and censorship

because there are no viable alternatives for large outreach.

I would argue the title implies “leaving the tech industry”, and in the beginning it says the article is for who wants to still work with the same skillset, but outside of the tech industry as in the companies who produce technology for profit. Probably only the tech co-op part can be said to be still within the tech industry

ok, CEO…

Germans are the invaders in Germany. This has been Celtic territory for millennia. Go back to your fucking steppes.

No, it’s global. There are two timeslots to better accommodate the broadest possible crowd. TWC is mostly active in the USA and Europe atm, because the Indian chapter basically merged with the local IT union and stopped operating as TWC.

The event is organized by the TWC Global chapter, which is the “digital” chapter that supports the local chapters throughout the world.

because a media outlet goes where there are viewers. They write to be read, so there’s little benefit in going on platforms where there’s nobody.

As somebody active in the politicization of tech workers, I see this as a great challenge to the stale narrative that tech workers are selfish, childish, passive. Both Luigi Mangione and Aaron Bushnel are tech workers and they are enough to prove a point.

not a single word about crypto is present in the video

are you familiar with left-wing blockchain and that whole strand of research or you just talk because you have no clue about the fact that there’s always been plenty of anti-capitalist and post-capitalist in the blockchain scene?