Africast 2008, a biannual conference on African broadcasting, took place in Abuja, Nigeria 21-23 October, 2008. This year’s them was “Digitisation and the Challenges of Broadcasting”.
During a special session on community broadcasting, Jummai Umar, Citizenship Program Manager for Microsoft Nigeria and Anglophone West Africa, presented a paper Amplifying the People’s Voices: Community Broadcasting in a Digital Era. Jummai has kindly allowed us to publish her paper here.
Continue reading ‘Community Broadcasting in a Digital Nigeria’
Tactical Tech is a group of people working to help NGOs and human rights advocates to make better use of technology in their work. One of the ways they do this is with their excellent NGO in-a-box project, a series of toolkits complete with software, information about on-line tools, tutorials, case studies and lots of ideas for how to make innovative use of practical technology within the technical and financial grasp of NGOs. The latest addition to the series, Mobiles in-a-box, is a candidate for inclusion in our ICT / local and community radio essential toolkit.
Continue reading ‘Radio and Mobiles in-a-box’
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.
Continue reading ‘Community media and SMS text messages’
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).
Continue reading ‘Frontline SMS’
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.
Continue reading ‘Canada doesn’t know what to do either…’
RSS Posts