At first glance SMS text messages would seem like a natural for inclusion in a community radio station’s essential toolkit. SMS messages are inexpensive and easy-to-use and in recent years the mobile phones that are needed for sending and receiving them have become ubiquitous. However, a survey of recent projects indicates that use of SMS messages among community media in the developing world is still at an early stage. In most stations SMS use is informal. The few cases identified of community stations making more complex use of SMS messages have accompanied political crises or natural disasters and have inevitably been donor financed. There are few, if any, experiences of complex uses of SMS by community media without external funding and technical support, even though the financial and technical resources required are minimal.
Tag Archive for 'mobile'
I wrote about about FrontlineSMS a few months ago. It’s a piece of software that turns a laptop and a mobile phone into a powerful system for sending and receiving SMS messages and that I think should be part of the essential digital toolkit for local and community radio. FrontlineSMS creator has just come out with a new version of the program, as well as a new website.
I haven’t tried the software (although I have requested it and we want to test it at a community radio station somewhere in Latin America) but Sanjana Hattotuwa gave it a pretty good grade in a blog post on mobileactive.org, although she questions whether it might be too complicated for some grassroots organisations and complained about compatibility problems with her Nokia 3110 (one that FrontlineSMS does NOT claim to support fully).
Canada’s regulatory agency for broadcasting and telecommunications, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), has launched a consultation on broadcasting in the new media environment for a public hearing to be held in early 2009. In 1999 the CRTC looked at new media services delivering content over the internet and decided to exempt them from content regulation. But a lot has changed since the days when fewer than 10% of those who used the internet had broadband connections.
UNESCO and Jamaica’s Container Project have launched a community multimedia centre (CMC) constructed in a wheeled garbage bin. The bin houses laptop computers, a radio transmitter, wireless internet and other peripherals. The bin will travel around Jamaica and be used to give creative multimedia workshops to inner-city, rural and otherwise marginalised communities.
The Container Project is an innovative, arts-driven engine for community empowerment through creativity. It is based in a bright yellow converted shipping container in the heart of Palmers Cross, a rural community noted for its poverty and associated social problems.
Continue reading ‘Mobile community multimedia in a trash bin’
More and more telephones come with built-in FM receivers but a new twist (at least for me) is Nokia’s Internet Radio Beta. It is software that you can install on certain Nokia phones in order to listen to streaming internet radio stations on your phone using whatever connection you have available. If you have a wifi connection at home or at a public access point, you can listen for free. If you don’t, you can also listen via GPRS or 3G.
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