"The agenda of the recent Challenger Commission meeting was leaked on Sailing Anarcy [sic] (nothing new there). Everyone said 'very interesting, I'd like to be a fly on the wall'. Now here's a dangerous precedent. You can be a fly on the wall. The full minutes [well not quite] of the meeting are published on the Challenger Commission website. That's the sort of open-ness bsuinesses and public bodies promise but rarely deliver. It quite shocked the America's Cup world, which thrives on rumour, leak and innuendo. Dangerous? Of course, if everybody promptly and honestly published details of all of their dealings what need would there be for a "Rumour and Speculation" page? And this [Mariantic Rumour and Speculation] page gets 80% of the site's hits. Only joking. The site is very welcome, keep it up....
-- The "Mariantic" AC News & Views website, February 2005
The Challenger Commission was formed by the Challenger of Record (Golden Gate YC /
BMW ORACLE Racing) in April 2004 when
+39 and then
Shosholoza filed their Challenges. As additional Challengers came onboard, we realized we needed a better way to keep everyone informed, including prospective Challengers, than just email. We were also concerned about leaks of CC information, malicious or otherwise. Realizing it was inevitable in the digital age, we decided that there was little harm, and maybe a lot of benefit, in going public with much of our CC info -- after all, we
are in the sports entertainment business. So why not give the public some insight into the inner workings of the CC and AC?
Obviously the solution was a website of some sort, perhaps a
Wiki. But it had to be fast, easy and inexpensive. We had no webmaster, little budget, and for sure most CC reps were busy as hell. Moreover, none would be up for much of a learning curve, let alone a steep one.
In surveying various websites and formats, it was easy to recognize the popularity and success of
Sailing Anarchy (then, as now, the number one sailing site) with its simple
blog-style format.
Sail-World was another good example, also essentially a blog, as is
The Daily Sail subscription site. No surprise, they are now number two and three, or so we are reliably informed.
Why not a Challenger Commission Blog -- a simple website of articles posted chronologically -- to keep ourselves on the same page (no pun intended), provide an archive of important information for existing and new Challengers as they came on board, and to have a way to explain publicly our mission and, if necessary, our side of an issue?
The CCB was born in the early hours of 30 January 2005 -- a bitterly cold, -18 deg. C night in Ann Arbor, Michigan (USA) -- when your jet-lagged Ed. (having flown from Europe to visit family en route to CC meetings in San Francisco the coming week) signed onto Google's free
Blogger service, clicked a few buttons, and typed in some basic information. Easy peasy. We had previously registered www.challengercommission.com, so it was a simple matter to sign up a hosting service and link them together with the new blog. All for a total investment of an hour or so and less than $100.
Our first post that morning was the agenda for the upcoming meetings, inasmuch as it had already been posted on SA. A few other seminal documents were uploaded and given sidebar links, and,
voilà, yet another blog was born, but the first one related to the America's Cup. (Posts before 30 January 2005, that you will see in the Archives area on the sidebar, were back-dated to help give new Challengers a sense of the chronology of events and when documents were issued.)
When the subject was introduced at Tuesday's CC meeting, "blog" met mostly with blank stares. Few of the CC Reps had ever heard the word. But in a few minutes online they could see how simple it was to navigate, search, and find documents. The CC voted unanimously to adopt it, and, after only a brief discussion, decided to make it a public website. Only a few documents with personal or strategic information would be posted behind a password. On Friday 4 February the
first official post went up -- the media statement from those CC meetings -- and the new site was warmly received both by the teams and the public.
In the ensuing two years there have been a total of 446 posts. The
Sitemeter (at the very bottom of each page) shows that we will soon top 100,000 visitors. I am sure none of us ever imagined we'd end up with so many posts let alone visitors.
As a bit of a birthday present for the Blog, today we enabled "commenting" -- the previous post refers. We hope commenting will further improve our ability to communicate, both internally and with our readers and supporters.
Cheers!
In terms of visitors, January was the CCB's biggest month yet. As interest in the LVC and AC grows over the coming weeks, no doubt this Sitemeter graph will continue north. Click here for the latest. And it seems these days everyone has a blog -- even the AC 32 Umpires are starting one. Who will be next, Hamish Ross?
Cartoon courtesy of Jim Borgman, The Cincinnati Enquirer.Labels: Blogging, CC
