The Grand Siesta may be in effect for Blaseball, but outside of the game the Houston Spies community has not been resting.
Yesterday, on the 12th of November, we ran the first Houston Spies Workplace Organising workshop, codenamed “Agitate. Educate. Operate.” This training was based on materials provided by the Industrial Workers of the World, and focused on helping apply the community spirit that we’ve seen demonstrated so many times in Blaseball to offline union organising.
As far as we’re aware, this sort of workshop is unprecedented in Fandom. There have absolutely been charity drives, fundraisers and encouragements to activism, but never anything as concrete as workshops to encourage union organising. We hope that this will be a portent for the future of Blaseball and fandom spaces as a whole.
We’re happy to say that the training went swimmingly (albeit a little bit over time. Our fault for running it in Birds weather.) Many of our participants did frighteningly well at predicting some of the things we were going to touch on later in the training. Afterwards, many have expressed that they’d be interested in putting what they’ve learned into practice in their own workplaces.
We’re happy to announce that we’re going to be running more of these over the next few months, as several workers who attended have volunteered to help us provide more workshops in future.
In the meantime, you can find the training materials we used here.
If you are interested in joining a union, you can join the IWW and contact our organisers here.
If you would be interested in helping us run more of these workshops or would like to talk to our organisers, please contact one of the Spies ambassadors or use the contact form below.
AGITATE EDUCATE OPERATE
This training was run thanks to the help of: Dalm Gwen, who is a legend Enbyss Kuramon Auri Kaye Pillar Zuki Oj Gallium Kit Mist Tess Tidal The Houston Spies Thanks to the IWW Organisers who I had to explain Blaseball to for their patience.