I’ve been working on the RNC ’08 Report website—found at www.rnc08report.org—since September 2008. From studying the usage patterns and speaking to people who use it, the site is definitely a worthwhile project on a number of levels.
Looking at the Google Analytics web statistic account attached to the site, statistics since its early October launch show a relatively steady growth rate, consistent with an archive-type site on a single issue.
I hadn’t thought of it quite like that, but Monica Bicking's father, David,Bicking at the recent RNC 8 Town Hall meeting described me as a “librarian”, which was pretty funny and very appropriate the more I thought about it.
The RNC 8 Town Hall Meeting.
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In the course of being in contact with the progressive community since the RNC, I have learned that the various legal teams and organizations, as well as the various solidarity clusters such as Friends of the RNC 8 and CRASS use the site regularly. Additionally, journalists covering the ongoing RNC aftermath have acknowledged its usefulness, such as Dave Orrick from the St. Paul Pioneer Press, who expressed appreciation for the site when I met him at that awful Heffelfinger-Luger report presentation on January 14th.
The site clearly serves a useful reference for many activists and professionals engaged in post-RNC work, and will be useful in three-and-a-half years when the next Republican National Convention rears its ugly head. One of the things I have been doing where time allows is going back to previous conventions and archiving key material on those, so the collective memory represented by the website is as comprehensive as possible.
Repeat visitors in blue, new visitors in green.
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When I look a more recent statistics, there are obviously more people who know about the site these days than when it was launched 4 months ago. In just the last month, January 1st–February 1st, the site saw 2,000 visits and 10,000 page views, with visitors spending an average of 6 minutes on the site.
245 of these visitors (around 12%) are people who have visited the site between 15 and 200 times during this month alone. 7% of the total, or 130 people, have visited the site more than 200 times during the last month, again confirming heavy research use.
Only 25% of these visitors are coming from search engines, with 30% coming to the site directly (ie. from a bookmark) and 45% from links on related sites (such as those run by CRASS, the Friends of the RNC 8, Twin Cities Indymedia, etc.). Again, this suggests the site is heavily used by people involved in one way or another with work during the RNC aftermath.
The RNC ’08 Report website currently archives just-published news from 80 different sources, usually within a few hours of the news becoming available on the Internet.
The amount of content on the site is considerable. Text documents—whether newspaper articles, press releases or organization mailings—form 71% of the site’s current total count of 732 documents.
18% of the total document count are video clips—local TV news reports, relevant City Council proceedings, and documentaries. In the case of the Photographs section, even a page with 45 pictures is counted as a single document.
The site also offers a useful calendar of upcoming solidarity events and, since February 7th, real time news (ie. breaking news) from the RNC 8, CRASS, and Twin Cities Indymedia websites.
As expected, 96% of the RNC ‘08 Report’s traffic comes from the United States, with 65% of that traffic coming from Minnesota, much of that clustered around the Twin Cities metro area.
Google Analytics overview of visitors to the RNC '08 Report from Minnesota.
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In addition to its online presence, the RNC ’08 Report has been engaged in different levels of archival support or concept work on three documentaries, Ground Noise and Static, Terrorizing Dissent: Election Cut, and an as-yet-unnamed documentary currently being edited by Ohio university students.
Last October, the RNC ’08 Report organized a benefit concert for Coldsnap Legal Collective and Food Not Bombs-Minneapolis at the Black Dog Cafe in Lowertown, St. Paul which saw around 60 guests and raised $1,000 to support returning out-of-town arrestees.
In January, the RNC ’08 Report organized the RNC photo exhibit titled, "Looking Back, Moving Forward", which saw over 300 community-submitted 8x10 images and received write ups in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Minnesota Public Radio, MinnPost, and a variety of other independent news outlets. Sources report that the local Metro magazine is schedule to publish an article about the exhibit, which is currently being expanded and prepared for travel around the United States to coincide with RNC 8 solidarity events.
Other RNC ’08 Report coverage has been seen on KFAI, Poynter Online and in the Minnesota Independent.
The RNC ’08 Report made a public submission to the Heffelfinger-Luger Commission and has been seeking out and publicly archiving other submissions to the Commission. To date, we have produced two analyses of the Heffelfinger-Luger Commission report—on the Commission’s failings and personnel make-up, and how the report dealt with the issue of the three mass arrests that took place during the Convention. Additional reports focusing on further aspects of the report’s narrative are planned.
Ultimately, after all the 2008 RNC-related data that can be collected has been collected, it is intended that the RNC ’08 Report will produce a truly citizen’s response to the events surrounding the 2008 Republican National Convention.
The new widget. Get one for your site here.
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Off the Internet, the RNC ’08 Report has been working with Communities Against Police Brutality, and members of the Anti-War Committee and Twin Cities Indymedia to secure the release of 6,000+ hours of CCTV video taken during convention week, with the goal of truly “releasing” the publicly-owned footage to everyone with an Internet connection.
There remains an incredible amount of RNC video and textual material—even from just the Convention week—that still needs to be publicly archived on the project.
Yep, we're going to archive everything. Watch the two Daily Show clips from the Convention here.
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The RNC ’08 Report was created to negate that disadvantage and turn that power dynamic on its head, and by all accounts has been very effective in that goal. The RNC ’08 Report will continue to be effective and relevant long after the Minnesotan court system processes the last case, both as a reference model and research tool for those involved in activism and related arenas during future National Security Special Events.
Nigel Parry
RNC ’08 Report/nigelparry.net
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