Digital organising is just organising

We already know well that there are no shortcuts in organising, and we must remind ourselves that this still applies to "digital organising": there is no online service that can build power; no data analysis that can substitute for a real collective voice; no social media communications strategy that can obviate the requirement for one-to-one conversations between workers.

Our priority must be to give workers the ability to organise themselves in the digital workplace. We are wholly accustomed to staging interventions in the physical workplace - with noticeboards, with conversations, with pickets - but all too often we allow ourselves to consider the digital workplace to be a largely opaque entity under the employer's purview alone. Too many of our efforts are focused on the periphery of the online workplace, rather than inside it.

More optimistically, the digital workplace provides workers with organising opportunities that were unimaginable not long ago. The strategic work of mapping and charting a workplace is a prerequisite for a successful organising campaign but it is arduous and - with hostile employers - can even place workers at risk. Trade unions have successfully used analysis and visualisation of sectoral and national membership data to inform bargaining agendas and organising priorities, and there is huge potential for what workers can achieve if we are able to empower them to do this within their own workplaces.