Published Date 10/2/12 4:28 PM

My last report on the NUJ conference was Graysky thinking. Lets look for a moment at some Bluesky thinking for the NUJ.

The nutcracker – The union and money

A few blue sky ideas:

* Have a roll out of support the union buttons on members blogs and sites and have the revenue offset the membership fee of that member. This would motivate them to push the buttons into visibility. Self interest and the greater good pushed together.

* Hard one to pull off and would need to be centrally negotiated. Use something like http://flattr.com on members story’s in corporate media, get an agreement with publications to do this and do a revenue split with the journalist and the union. 

* Humm… who is going to buy me a beer to come up with more.

Launch a micro-union for citizen journalists, open media people.

* Very low fees

* Self help

* Horizontal web organising

* Open to any one

Technological leadership

At the moment members activity’s are fractured amongst many different websites and corporatist social networks. Everybody knows this is a failed strategy, could the NUJ help to lead the momentum to jumping off this sinking ship?

Use a small amount of its resources to fund a openmedianetwork for the membership. This will provide a bag of tools for members projects.

* use an existing opensource tool such as liferay (http://liferay.com) to provide tools to its membership.

* it has OPEN drag and drop working to build websites in hours rather than days or months

* the CMS can host as many websites and user blogs as are needed, it will build a single login in and single activity stream experience out of the box. And is scalable on modest resources.

* it is opendata and open standered so users can leave if they grow beyond its scope or expand functionality as they need.