The report has 2 main sections, the first on digital radio broadcasting and the second on how new ICTs can be used to make community radio stations more open, accessible and participatory.

Digital television broadcasting has been widely debated in the region and for better or worse most countries have selected the standards they will use and begun to develop strategies for an eventual transition to digital and an accompanying “analogue switchoff”. Digital radio, however, has barely been considered by most governments in the region, even though the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) maintains 2015 as the deadline for the transition to all digital broadcasting in most of the world. While the ITU deadline will almost certainly not be met, there is an urgent need to define the principles will guide any eventual transition. A few of these include:

• - the introduction of digital radio must be done in a way that will enable a more diverse and democratic broadcasting system
• - whatever technical standard is adopted must be flexible and adaptable
• - open standards are the only way of ensuring technological independence
• - there can be no analgue switchoff until digital transmitting equipment is financially and practically accessible to community and independent radio and until digital receivers are accessible to all sectors of the population

The report was written by Bruce Girard, Carlos Camacho, Pablo Vannini and René Roemersma and is available in Spanish only.

Download El Bit de la Cuestión: La radio popular y comunitaria en la era digital.

Authors: Bruce Girard, Carlos Camacho, Pablo Vannini and René Roemersma.

Published by: Asociación Latinoamericana de Educación Radiofónica (ALER)
Asociación Mundial de Radios Comunitarias, América Latina y Caribe (AMARC ALC).

Buenos Aires, 2010. ISBN 978-987-25395-3-5

Read the article on WACC’s website.

Podcasts in Thai, Bahasa and Tagalog are available for download from the APMM website.

APMM is a Hong Kong based centre working for the promotion and protection of the rights and wellbeing of migrants in the Asia Pacific and Middle East regions.  WACC is the

Continues on the Mediashify IDEALAB >>

Joseph Sekiku of Tanzania’s

FADECO Community Radio is a local radio in NW Tanzania. Its programming is characterised with a strong focus on rural development (65%) with the rest of the air time distributed among 25% news and general information and entertainment (culture, history, arts) at 10%. Agriculture takes the lions share of our programming.

The main challenges for a rural community radio are related to information/ content generation, repackaging, dissemination and feedback (monitoring to see if the message are making any meaningful impact on the listeners). In order to address this challenge, FRC  100.8 FM has sought to use the available ICTs both for content generation and for getting a feed back from the farmers or listeners. And here is how it works at FADECO:

Information gathering/ content generation

Farmers walk to FADECO to ask questions and report agriculture related problems or other concerns facing them. As a one stop centre for information, the staff at FRC 100.8 FM receive the questions, and pass them onto competent staff (who can respond or refer the questions to other experts or identify experts who can respond to the questions). Referrals to experts is normally done via email. Sometime internet searches are made. Sometimes searches are made in our offline resource base (compendia, books, cd-rom libraries).

Sometimes farmers send text messages to our office mobile number. In the past months, FRC 100.8 FM has signed a contract with a SMS management company in Dar es salaam and has been allocated 2 short code numbers. What the farmer does is to use his/ her mobile phone:

Go to write new Message: Write FR.. leave one space, write a question and then send to 15551 or Write EFR .. leave one space, write question and send to 15522.

The question is delivered directly to our computer via a web managed system. We are therefore able to print it off, respond directly or email the question to our experts.

The farmer receives a received note on his/ her mobile phone immediately to confirm the message is received at FADECO.

After the question/ request is processed, we make a radio program with the response. Unfortunately, we cannot call nor text individual farmers who send questions… we do not have the money. So when we have the answer, in a radio program, we just broadcast on radio to the benefit of the individual farmers that asked the question and of many other farmers who may be listening.

Use of ICT infrastructure by journalists

At FADECO COMMUNITY RADIO, the facility is making it possible, not only to provide the traditional telecentres services (internet and library services) but now in a big way, we are able to package, re-package and develop information into radio programs that are broadcast via FADECO RADIO. This is a big achievement.

This therefore also now underscores the involvement of journalists with FADECO TELECENTRE. To start with, fadeco radio has teamed with a number of journalists who provide news to the station; while at the same time, taking news to from the station. But specifically how do the journalists use the telecentre:

1. Accessing news stories from the internet: Journalists use our internet facilities to search news stories from the internet. Some of the stories are used on our radio station.
2. Also they use the internet to communicate with other journalist to send stories or news via email. I have seen also journalists use SKYPE to communicate and provide live reporting to their bureaus in Dar es salaam.
3. One thing at FADECO TELECENTRE is the integration of the different ICTS: we have in place VSAT for internet access, Fax, telephone services (landline and mobile). These ICTS are used integrally for content generation (esp. news) and for communication with others.
4. Journalists come to use the telecentre to send faxes or receive faxes, check their emails as mentioned above, but also most important, they use our facilities for interviewing, recording, and editing. The telecdntre is laos used as a meeting place for journalists in the area. Some of them prefer to use the centre also for their meetings and;
5. One other use has been with ONLINE study. I have seen 2-4 journalists coming to the telecentre, just because they are doing online journalist or media studies.
6. And lastly, journalists use our telecentre for secretarial purposes like to write their stories or to print them or to photocopy documents. A few have borrowed our recorders, after which they download content on the computers, edit them and go away with content edited and stored on CDs.

This is a rather fragmented narration of the general benefits of FADECO RADIO/ TELECENTRE to the general public and on how we are integrating different ICTs.

Regards,

Joseph Sekiku
FADECO Community Radio

RadarCultura website

BBC Digital Planet story How the web makes radio reactive

Download a Spanish-language version of this article

When the GSM mobile telephone standard was developed engineers included the ability to send short text messages, up to 160 characters, between phones. Operators were sceptical about the service’s ability to interest customers or to generate revenue, but consumers massively took it up as a convenient and inexpensive alternative to voice calls.  With time applications and services were developed enabling, for example, broadcast messages, mobile payments, polling and information services. In 2007 global revenue from SMS messages was more than $50 billion with more than 1 trillion messages sent.(1)

As mobile phones become increasingly common, SMS messages are being used by community media in a variety of ways.

At its simplest, announcers and journalists announce their phone mumbers over the air and invite listeners to send messages with comments on the news, questions, greetings, song requests… Some of these are then used on-air. In some cases, stations have devised ways of generating feedback via mobiles without the listeners having to pay even the cost of an SMS message. For example, Xtreme FM, a community-oriented pirate station in the UK, has a mobile permanently in the studio:

“It vibrates every few seconds like a faulty alarm clock, as listeners call and text. Scrolling through its inbox, I notice scores of “missed calls”. Big N explains that this is how pirates gauge a record’s popularity. If listeners like a tune, they call in and then ring off, so the studio mobile registers a “missed call”. This costs callers nothing. If Xtreme receives over 20 missed calls from different numbers before a track ends, the DJs play it again. This is why teenagers listen to pirate radio: it’s interactive in ways legal stations can’t match.”(2)

Another example is Interactive Radio for Justice, a radio programme in Ituri, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that answers listeners’ questions about justice issues sent by SMS. Ethan Zuckerman points out that sending questions via SMS allows for anonymity, an important point when your question is: “Are soldiers allowed to stay at my house and eat my food without paying for it?”

Desktop software and web-based services allow stations to do more. International broadcasters such as the BBC make extensive use of these tools as do some commercial stations. However, there are few examples of local and community radio using them, even though they offer a low-cost and relatively simple way of stimulating participation and interaction.

There are various software and service packages available. Among them is FrontlineSMS(3), a programme that runs on a computer connected by a cable to an ordinary mobile phone. Unlike most other programs and services, FrontlineSMS does not require a connection to the internet – messages are composed, stored and processed on the computer and sent and received on the mobile. There are a variety of tools available with different capabilities and pricing.(4) Basic services useful for community media include:

• - Broadcast messages to dozens or even thousands of mobiles advising them of a special programme or an important community activity

• - Keyword response – when a listener sends the word “ocio” the station replies with a text message listing activities while “noticias” is answered with current headlines and “Colectivo a Lima” is answered with the departure times of the next six buses to the capital

Experiencies combining SMS services and broadcast radio can be found in moments of political crisis and natural disasters. For example, SMS and radio were used to help monitor the 2000 presidential elections in Ghana:

[V]oters who were prevented from voting used mobile phones to report their experience to call-in shows on local radio stations. The stations broadcast the reports, prompting police to respond to the accusations of voter intimidation. Had voters called the police directly, it’s possible that authorities might not have responded — by making reports public through the radio, voters eliminated the possibility of police announcing that there had been no reports of voter intimidation. Similar techniques have been used in Sierra Leone, Senegal, and even in the United States — American voters used mobile phone cameras and Websites to record reports of voting irregularities during the 2006 congressional elections.(5)

The ongoing political crisis in Zimbabwe provides another example of the complementarity of radio and SMS. Faced with one of the most repressive media environments in the world, Gerry Jackson founded SW Radio Africa located in the UK and broadcasting to Zimbabwe on shortwave. The signal is jammed in urban areas (thanks to Chinese technology, according to Jackson), but gets through to rural zones. The station also streams it programming on the internet and podcasts ara available to the very few connected to the internet from Zimbabwe, but increasingly important are the headlines sent to phones in Zimbabwe using SMS. According to Jackson:

Currently we’re most excited about our latest endeavour – sending SMS news headlines into Zimbabwe, via mobile phones. We generate news headlines on a daily basis anyway – so this is just another way of using what already exists.

It’s nice and cost effective… because there is only the one cost, actually sending the texts. In two months we’ve built up an address database of about 2,000 mobile phone numbers.

Like many, Zimbabweans truly love their mobile phones and of course what we’re banking on is the virus effect. We also get up to 100 requests a day to be added to the service so it’s growing rapidly.(6)

During natural disasters SMS and radio have been used to provide emergency communication, for example an earthquake Yogyakarta and Central Java in Indonesia  killed more than 5,000 people and displaced 1.6 million in May 2006. With support from Internews, a U.S.-based NGO, a radio station and SMS text messaging provided news about relief efforts.

The service was run through an emergency AM radio station, Radio Punokawan, established by the Indonesian Press and Broadcast Society, with support from Internews. In addition to radio broadcasts, important information was sent and received from the newsroom via text messaging. Outgoing messages warned of aftershocks and identified communities that had not yet received government assistance. More than 180 Indonesian journalists distributed and received information through the service.(7)

Some stations have incorporated SMS polling into their programming. During Kenya’s 2007 elections a local radio and television stations and newspapers used SMS to poll listeners on a number of questions. While the  results of the polls were posted on a website and discussed in the local media, the questions were designed to provoke debate about democracy rather than to measure public opinion. Examples included: “Have politicians done enough to fight corruption and mismanagment of public resources?”, “Do you think special seats should be created for women in parliament?”, “Does party politics foster national unity?” and “Do you feel your vote has the power to make a difference?”.

A new project in Grahamstown, South Africa proposes to use SMS to create a network of citizen journalists for a local newspaper. Eighty high school journalists trained as citizen journalists will send their news and views via SMS messages. A selection of the messages will be printed in the newspaper while others will be redistributed via SMS to community members. The project coordinator admits that it will be difficult to fit the news into the 160 characters that an SMS message can have, but they are already thinking of how to overcome the problem.

In the future, Berger hopes that the program will expand and possibly include other technologies like MMS (multimedia) messages. “We want to interface with the newspaper website, and we’re developing open source software to link the two,” he said. Berger said that there would also be research into the effectiveness of the project. “Then we’re also going to research next year the significance of this whole project,” he said. “Is it making a difference? What does it mean for democracy to have a lot of citizen journalism and to have young people contributing to the public opinion?”(8)

Projects combining SMS and radio have been enabled by the rapid takeup of mobile phones. Globally there is one mobile phone for every two people and in many countries of Latin America the majority of poor people now have access to a mobile telephone.(9) Internet connections and fixed line telephones are still out of reach for much of the world’s population, but mobile telephones have spread faster than any other communication technology in history.

“The only technology that compares to the mobile phone in terms of pervasiveness and accessibility in the developing world is the radio. Indeed, considered together, radios and mobile phones can serve as a broad-distribution, participatory media network with some of the same citizen-media dynamics of the Internet, but accessible to a much wider, and non-literate audience.”(10)

A study of mobile telephone use by people from low-income households in seven Latin American and Caribbean countries indicates high level of SMS by the region’s poor, apparently attracted to the technology because of its low-cost.(11)

Lessons learned?

We have not independently evaluated the experiences presented here, relying instead on accounts gathered from various media accounts and websites. As a result we are unable to clearly identify many of the enabling aspects or problems encountered. Certainly the rapid expansion of mobile telephony, the low cost of SMS messages and the aspirations of community radio stations to be accessible and participatory are important factors for enabling SMS messages for encouraging community participation and feedback.

The real question is not what has enabled the projects described here, but why are more community radio stations not making active use of SMS to communicate with their listeners? Certainly the very rapid take up of mobile telephony is one reason. In many countries the number of users has doubled over the past two years or so and it is understanable that radio stations will take some time to devise strategies for using the technology. Other reasons could include the limitations of 160 characters per message and users who do not know how to use SMS.(12)

While there has been some spontaneous use of SMS messages as a way of facilitiating communication with listeners and community members, more complex projects using SMS servers and applications have generally emerged as a response to political crises or natural disasters. There are few, if any, experiences of complex uses of SMS without external funding and technical support, even though the financial and technical resources required are minimal.

A joint research project of AMARC’s Latin America and Caribbean region and ALER, will establish “labs” to experiment with the use of various ICTs in community radio stations in Latin America. Including advanced SMS servers and services in the package of options offered by the labs should provide some information about the appropriateness and potential of this technology for the region’s community media.

Bruce Girard
July 2008
If you know about or are involved in an SMS/community media project, please tell us about it as a reply to this post or by email.  blog2[at]comunica[dot]org

Footnotes

1. http://www.portioresearch.com/Mob_Mess_Fut_brochure.pdf
2. http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0309/msg00107.html
3. http://frontlinesms.com
4. MobileActive has evaluated some of these tools and their use in campaigns http://mobileactive.org/wiki/Desktop_SMS_Campaign_Tools. Also see their comparison of various tools at http://mobileactive.org/wiki/SMS_Tool_Comparison_Matrix
5. Ethan Zukerman, Mobile Phones and Social Activism: Why cell phones may be the most important technical innovation of the decade” http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/index.php?s=vastly+exceeds+internet+usage
6. Texting news to bypass censors, http://www.mediahelpingmedia.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=142&Itemid=1
7. Wireless Technology for Social Change: Trends in Mobile Use by NGOs http://mobileactive.org/files/MobilizingSocialChange_full.pdf
8. Local news with SMS http://mobileactive.org/spreading-news-sms-0
9. A study of 7,000 low income households in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Jamaica, Mexico, Peru, and Trinidad and Tobago found that in every country except Mexico a majority of respondents had used a mobile phone in the past 3 months. In 4 of the 7 countries a majority of respondents owned their own mobile phones. http://www.dirsi.net/espanol/content/view/197/71/
10. Ethan Zuckerman http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/index.php?s=%22vastly+exceeds+internet+usage%22
11. A DIRSI study of 7,000 low income households in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Jamaica, Mexico, Peru, and Trinidad and Tobago found that in every country except Mexico a majority of respondents had used a mobile phone in the past 3 months. In 4 of the 7 countries a majority of respondents owned their own mobile phones. http://www.dirsi.net/espanol/content/view/197/71/
12. The DIRSI study cited lack of knowledge as the main reason given by people when asked why they did not use SMS. According to the study, this is “not surprising given that most respondents are relatively new users (two years or less). In fact, our results suggest that adoption of services beyond voice increases over time, as users advance along the technical learning curve.”

Guy Berger, the project coordinator and head of the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University, admits that it will be difficult to fit the news into the 160 characters that an SMS message can have, but they are already thinking of how to overcome the problem.

In the future, Berger hopes that the program will expand and possibly include other technologies like MMS (multimedia) messages. “We want to interface with the newspaper website, and we’re developing open source software to link the two,” he said. Berger said that there would also be research into the effectiveness of the project. “Then we’re also going to research next year the significance of this whole project,” he said. “Is it making a difference? What does it mean for democracy to have a lot of citizen journalism and to have young people contributing to the public opinion?”

Local News with SMS at mobileactive.org

The national studies addressed a common set of topics, providing descriptions and analyses of country/case examples. The topics were:

• Participatory processes and volunteerism
• Relationship with the community
• Exertion of rights
• Accountability and good governance
• Community radio networks
• Financing and financial sustainability
• Community radio in conflict and post-conflict situations

The main report is by Bruce Girard of Fundación Comunica

The national studies were conducted by: Amparo Cadavid – Colombia, Martin Faye – Mali, Raghu Mainali – Nepal, Carlos Rivadeneyra – Peru, and Nkopane Maphiri, South Africa. The national are included as annexes in their original languages.

Download the main report (PDF)
Download the main report and the national studies (in their original languages, PDF, 2.4 meg)

More than 5,000 people died and 1.6 million were displaced as a result of the May 2006 earthquake in Yogyakarta and Central Java in Indonesia. During the days and weeks following the disaster, ordinary citizens received valuable news via text message. The text messaging service was put in place by Internews, a U.S.- based NGO that works to improve people’s access to information around the world.

The service was run through an emergency AM radio station, Radio Punokawan, established by the Indonesian Press and Broadcast Society, with support from Internews. In addition to radio broadcasts, important information was sent and received from the newsroom via text messaging. Outgoing messages warned of aftershocks and identified communities that had not yet received government assistance. More than 180 Indonesian journalists distributed and received information through the service.

The February 2008 issue of SPORE, the magazine of the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) has an article by Ednah Karamagi, a member of a Ugandan team “committed to pushing out the ICT frontiers” describes some of the ways they are using Web 2.0 applications to help farmers boost production and sell their produce for a better price. The applications used include podcasts.

Another knowledge-sharing method we use is podcasts. Farmers who are knowledgeable about a given subject make recordings, currently in local languages, though we plan to add English at a later stage. These are then turned into audio CDs and distributed to other farmers, who have received CD players from BROSDI. Copies of these recordings are also uploaded on the CELAC website.