nigelparry.net: The RNC '08 Report (library/archive project)

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The RNC '08 Report (library/archive project)

This website exists to provide a citizen's archive of media reports, government documents, and other resources relating to the 2008 RNC. The source material posted on this website will ultimately used to compile a truly independent, publicly available, citizen's report on what happened during the 2008 RNC.

The RNC '08 Report is a nigelparry.net project from the award-winning creator of the Electronic Iraq and Electronic Intifada websites. Visually simple and content-focused, the site is built on a powerful, rapidly-growing database whose contents are still in the process of being cross-referenced and having additional browsing features activated. Visit the site at rnc08report.org.

Above: A video page on the project. The Content Management System was customized to allow for local archiving of local TV news reports from the Convention and other video, such as this documentary from independent journalists Submedia.tv and Pepperspray Productions. The process of uploading a video is as simple as browsing for a file, clicking, and copying the file path to a field. The page then creates the video screen and captioning automatically. This simple process allows for high volume video additions to the archive. With 300+ local TV news reports—before even considering other sources—it is important that this process was as simple as possible.

THE RNC '08 REPORT PROJECT IN THE PRESS...

Building a “citizen’s archive” of the RNC

By Jeff Severns Guntzel, Minnesota Independent, October 8th, 2008

Nigel Parry wasn’t arrested, harassed, or gassed during the RNC. But he was affected.

At the Tilsner Artists’ Cooperative, where he’s lived on and off over the years, he shared a room a friend was renting out to people working for Indy Media and the Glass Bead Collective. “I spent the week with extremely freaked out and justifiably paranoid independent media people.”

He was getting “fog of war” reports all week. It was difficult to get the big picture — it still is.

So Parry–a songwriter, photojournalist, and web designer — started a paper archive of everything that happened outside the Xcel. “I printed everything from Star Tribune reports to St. Paul City Council minutes.”

People he met during the convention who had stayed in town to work on a documentary about the RNC kept asking him about one document or another. “Finally I just decided to gather everything online.”

Parry has experience with this. He co-founded the website Electronic Intifada after his experiences in the West Bank. To this day, the site is an always-current archive of events in Palestine — often written by Palestinians themselves.

Parry’s current endeavor is RNC ‘08 Report. He calls it “a citizen’s archive of media reports, government documents, and other resources.”

His collection, he insists, “is unprejudiced — it’s the widest possible range of sources because that’s what will be the most helpful. I’ve archived the Twitter feeds and I’ve archived Department of Defense press releases about the deployment of the national guard. I’ve got city press releases on the arrests of the RNC 8 and the press releases of the RNC Welcoming Committee.”

He’s still furiously adding to the site and wants people to tell him what he’s missing. His vision is nothing short of a total archive.

“The goal,” he says, “is clarity.”

Above: A sense of the variety of sources already contained on the website. You can read the military communication-style transcripts of the protest groups' sector Twitter feeds during Day 1, or find a U.S. Army press release about the deployment of the National Guard from the Department of Defense. The RNC '08 Report project is dedicated to the idea that true democracy, transparency, and accountability requires widely-available, free, public access to the greatest possible number of information sources and opinions. A healthy dose of reality—and especially of all of reality—helps us to see things as they really are in a world where many people and institutions have a vested interest in making sure that we do not.

Visit the site at rnc08report.org