The first sentence of HD Radio chapter in “The State of the News Media“, an annual review prepared on the media in the USA by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism says it all.

According to the report:

• Only 2,012 of the nation’s 14,417 AM and FM stations broadcast HD signals
• Only about one half of these use HD to broadcast more than one simultaneous program (multicast)
• Only 184 stations added HD capability to their broadcasts in 2009 – a rate that will see all stations broadcasting in HD within 78 years
• Despite iBiquity’s massive promotional campaigns, HD has failed to capture consumer interest with only 32% of people saying that they are even somewhat interested in HD Radio

The report also looks at podcasts, noting that some 27 million people reported listening to podcasts at least once a month. “Growth in listeners, however, doesn’t come close to matching the growth in the number of podcasts available.”

The project, supported by the UK NGO Practical Action,  distributes the podcasts in battery operated MP3 players housed in “mobile libraries”. Community members can borrow the MP3 players to listen to the podcasts.

According to the  Lawrence D. Gudza the project has been a success:

Within six months of the project starting, the technology has reached about 75% of the local population. Farmer-to-farmer knowledge exchange has also improved, with a large proportion of neighbouring communities also benefiting from the information.

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

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.”

The article provides an interesting case for why and how podcasting can contribute to development, but unfortunately we are still waiting for real world examples. The Peruvian project discussed, for example, was piloted in 2006 and doesn’t appear to have been active since then.

The session report and a few photos that were included on the CD are below, along with a link to the full WEMF III report.

WEMF website (where you can find the full report)

SESSION 6: ROLE OF ‘OWN-TIME MEDIA’/‘ANY-PLACE MEDIA’ IN THE SERVICE FOR DEVELOPMENT – MILLENIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS

A rapidly growing number of people in the OECD countries listen to radio content of their choice through podcasts on their iPods or other MP3 players. This allows them to have access to high quality content in the area of their specific interest and at a time and place that doesn’t conflict with their work and obligations. What about the developing world? Is there a scope to use MP3 players beyond urban music consumption, particularly to make specific high quality content available to the poor and people in remote areas? What could be the role of public service broadcasters who have a competitive advantage in providing trusted high quality content? The panelists discussed some encouraging first lessons and trends in a global and local context that is shaped by media convergence.

The chairman for Session 6 was Dr Abdul Waheed Khan, Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information, UNESCO and the panel, in order of speaking were:

• Ms Lucy Hooberman, Innovation Executive, Research and Innovation, BBC Future Media and technology
• Ms Seema B. Nair, Project Leader UNESCO India
• Mr Bruce Girard, Expert in community radio and local media, Comunica
• Ms Kristine Pearson, Chief Executive, Freeplay Foundation

Dr Abdul Waheed Khan opened the session with a reference to the revolution in information and communication technology which in the last 20 years had led to an explosion with Internet radio, pod casting ‘and all kinds of other ….castings’ in the 21 st century.

He noted that in a previous session Nigel Parsons had referred to a ‘renaissance’ for radio as the priority medium for information and access by the poor. The order of priority of access to technologies in poorer counties was first radio, secondly television then mobile telephony and finally the Internet. In rich counties users had access to all of these. It had also been mentioned in a previous session that mobile telephony had become more commonplace even in developing countries.

Internationally there was a trend from real time to ‘my time’; However Dr Abdul Waheed Khan asked whether this was commonplace or only true for the developed countries.

Ms Lucy Hooberman said that in a previous day’s session her colleague Richard Porter had mentioned that the BBC World Services was now in its 75 th year. However she pointed out that the BBC was only now celebrating 10 years of Internet presence with bbc.co.uk.

Research had shown that some 12 million people in the UK owned an MP3 player and of these 2 million claimed to have made use of them for podcasts. Most people were actually subscribing to podcasts rather than searching around and the most popular service had been found to be iTunes.

A radio podcasting trial had been run to assess audience demand for programming and the team’s ability to maintain a service to the public. Happily the trial had been very popular and had now become a service.
Although podcasting was still a niche activity it was growing, but it was constrained in that it required an effort on the part of users to subscribe, to download and to organise themselves to use the service.

For the BBC podcasting was part of a journey to make its content available any time, any place. It was also a part of the BBC’s commitment to helping the public understand how to get the most out of their licence fee and to become ‘digital citizens’.

Ms Hooberman cautioned that, once an organisation went down this route, there were a lot of things to think about. Opening up to the public and allowing the public to discuss and contribute content, although a very good step to take, was also a very big step which made very great demands on staff and their time.

An important task was to work with the public on media literacy as it could not be taken for granted that all new developments would be immediately understandable to everybody. For a very large organisation, that applied to the staff as well as the public. There was a job of work to be done to help people to change their styles of work from simply broadcasting to an audience to having a relationship with ‘the people formerly known as the audience’ but who were now content creators, co-creators and discussants on all aspects of content. This had relevance to the subject of the ‘public sphere’.

Ms Hooberman gave a few examples, the first being a pair of blogs, one for teachers and one for students, set up by the BBC World Service, for teaching English around the world. The dialogues had been found to be quite powerful.

‘Pods and Blogs’ was a BBC Radio 5 programme which made a major attempt to explain to the public the nature of pods and blogs, to review the blogosphere and to engage the public in discussion.

The iPM programme (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ipm/) allowed possibilities for the audience to contribute content. An interesting feature was that the programme’s advanced running order was published at the planning stage so that, by the time the programmes went to air, users could actually see the changes to which they may have contributed.

Ms Seema B Nair said her work at UNESCO involved visiting communities concerning ICT and community radio initiatives across Asia. Typically it was seen that there were enormous problems of lack of access, lack of infrastructure, problems of literacy and a cultural diversity which did not allow centralised content. As a result of this there was no tried and tested model of anytime media.

UNESCO had tried to integrate rather than push technology. A good model of this was the eTUKTUK initiative in Kothmale, Sri Lanka. A tuktuk was a common type of three wheeled transport in South Asia. A lot of technology had been loaded into the vehicle including a laptop computer, a CDMA enabled Internet connection and a generator to allow the vehicle to operate in areas without electricity.
Kothmale community radio was perched on a hill with only two buses per day. It was therefore very difficult for access by members of the audience who might wish to participate in programming; eTUKTUK was a way of bringing the radio station out of the studio and into community.

In the region the majority Tamil community worked in the tea estates and, because of lack of literacy, access and education had virtually no voice in radio programming. With the commencement of the eTUKTUK initiative a variety of content was created from within the villages. The community provided themes and campaigns rather than one-off programmes. Amongst others there were campaigns against corruption, concerning health matters and for good access to drinking water.
Starting from radio the communities began looking to the computer to translate topics into short digital video stories using photographs and brief video clips. These had great impact in forcing the community to go beyond identifying problems to considering how those problems might be practically solved.

Ms Nair suggested that the Kothmale experience had shown that the use of one medium alone might not get the involvement of the community and so ‘radio browsing’ evolved where a presenter would browse the Internet for information during the programme. This technique had spread to television and Ms Nair described how a presenter, talking about HIV/AIDS, had demonstrated how to browse the Internet in conjunction with the content, thus teaching the audience about the practical value and use of the Internet.

Ms Nair concluded by suggesting that much as the discussion was about technology and how to use technology for development, it was vital to consider aspects that were crucial to the community and to focus on not just making content for them but getting them to make their own content. Only then would the activity be sustainable in the long term.

Mr Bruce Girard was pleased to note that technology was catching up with what community radio had been doing since it started broadcasting 50 years ago. User generated content, citizen journalism, narrow casting and participation in every sense of the word had been at the very roots of community radio since the first stations were set up in the late 1940s.

Community radio stations were owned by their communities with participation as the essential key. This included participation in production, in feedback and in determining the editorial policy of the station. This appeared to go way beyond what had been allowed on the Internet so far.

Participation was a key and radio stations were now making the Internet an essential part of what they did. They were making very effective use of the Internet and mobile telephony in several ways:

1) Information and news gathering – Even though not everyone had access, literacy or linguistic skills or the skill to use search engines effectively, community radio stations were playing an intermediary role and the radio and the Internet could work together. Community radio journalists with an intimate knowledge of the community and technical knowledge of the Internet used the Net as a source of information. They searched for relevant information and then translated and contextualised it so it could be used by the community.

2) Networking – At the second conference of the World Association of Community Broadcasters (AMARC) in 1986, participants had voted to ask the board to look into the possibility of setting up an international news agency. AMARC was unable to comply at the time because just the basic infrastructure would have cost many millions of dollars. Ten years later, in 1996, Púlsar began operation as an Internet-based news agency offering news in text and audio formats to hundreds of radio stations in Latin America. Now community radio stations that were previously isolated had access to low-cost networks for exchanging news and audio programmes and for designing and implementing national and international campaigns.

3) Interaction and community participation – Radio stations had been able to harness the rapid increase in use of mobile phones to enable new ways of community participation via vois and SMS messages. Where previously listeners might have had to travel for hours to reach the station to ask a question or make a comment, they could now call.

Mr Girard felt strongly that an iPod with earphones wasn’t something that would bring people out of isolation. He considered podcasting not to be broadcasting but a distinct platform with different uses from broadcasting. One of community broadcasting’s biggest challenges was to take people out of their isolation, but podcasting, at least as it was currently practised with iPods and earphones, could not do this.

Ms Kristine Pearson explained that the Freeplay Foundation was all about access to information for the very poorest people in sub-Saharan Africa where it had been her great privilege to work for the last 20 years.
Freeplay had started nine years ago with big black wind-up radios with great sound quality. One thousand of them had been given to child-headed households and had made a huge difference to the children of this large and vulnerable population to whom, surprisingly, the most popular programme was ‘the news’.

Ms Pearson asked what was the point of radio programming if people couldn’t listen to it. The Freeplay Foundation was all about access. In sub-Saharan Africa, electric power was limited and AA batteries were of low quality, toxic and too expensive. Batteries were also a gender issue since men were the only ones who had money, could afford batteries and thus operate radios. So how was programming to reach women and children?

Ms Pearson described the ‘Lifeline’ radio launched in 2003. The radio could use solar power or could be hand cranked and its design took into account the fact that the users did not have experience of technology. Environmental hazards were accounted for in the design including the fact that the cable had been found to be very popular with hungry goats. Some 160,000 units had been distributed. However, due to the communal nature of the audience, it could be estimated that the total audience might be a least 6 million listeners.

Showing the next innovation, the prototype of the ‘Lifeline MP3’, Ms Pearson said it was the latest development of the Lifeline radio. Colourfully and practically designed, every feature of the radio had had input from orphaned children on the premise that if it worked for children it would work for adults. This radio would be able to record programming or replay pre-recorded material via a USB slot on the radio which allowed it to be connected to an MP3 unit.

Ms Pearson concluded with the statement that “Where others talk first about content, we talk about access.”

Forum, Questions and Answers

The chairman summed up by noting that presentations had ranged from cutting edge innovations such as podcasting to three examples of people working at the grass roots level.

People did not develop technology with millennium development goals in mind and indeed there was near consensus on the belief that almost all the goals would not be met by 2015.

It was development planners and practitioners who examined new technologies and looked at how technological developments might benefit the task of meeting development goals. He asked Ms Hooberman for her views on how best we could apply technological development such as podcasting to developing countries.

Ms Hooberman responded that podcasting was just one of the ways of delivering content. However she felt that portability and miniaturisation were very important. She described how with an iPod one could plug in a microphone, record an interview with someone in the forum, call someone up in any part of the world and have a dialogue with them. The questions arose however as to whom that dialogue should be with and what its purpose would be. Certainly the tools were there but others needed to identify the goals which, in the shorter term, needed to be concentrated upon. Knowing this, the broadcast technologists could perhaps contribute towards meeting those goals.

Mr Javed Jabbar, Pakistan, suggested that in order to meet the ‘elusive’ millennium goals, quality of service, delivery, governance and social justice was very important. He asked if any of the projects were part of a larger programme with quantifiable goals and results; for example the reduction of child and maternal mortality rates etc related to the targets of the MDG.

Bruce Girard replied that this was a very important question and one which all who had been working in community development for years had been concerned about. The methodology of measuring impact was however difficult. Although he felt that he could not answer the question directly he referred to an encouraging example related by Mr James Deane concerning work in India where the BBC World Service Trust had 50 researchers doing just that kind of work. This was also happening in some very complicated places such as Afghanistan and Sudan. The compilation of all this information was the next objective and the results of this could be very valuable.

Kristine Pearson said that impact of information was woefully under-resourced and that appropriate distribution of funding was an issue. Listnership figures were important but there were serious weaknesses in surveys. For example in one survey a person who listened to a programme only once a month was considered to be a listener. Impact assessment required the audience to listen to the programme throughout the series. Control groups were also important.

Seema B Nair stressed the value of ‘before’, ‘during’ and ‘after’ evaluations of a programme. People in the community could be trained to play a part in this. It was important that the data must be seen to serve the people they referred to.

Dr Sreedher Ramamurthy from India quoted a positive example of impact which took place after campus radio broadcasts on HIV screening. Six months after the broadcasts a visiting UNICEF representative had asked students if they knew about tests for AIDS. The students said yes but that they were afraid to go for the tests themselves. However they agreed to go for the test if the UNICEF representative would go with them. Radio had clearly made an impact.

Mr Mark Selby of Nokia was delighted to hear that mobile phones were being used in combination with radio and said more than half Nokia’s mobile phones included a built in FM tuner. Many devices included MP3 capability and experiments had been done with visual radio and a recently launched Internet radio service.The panel was asked what other features they would like mobile phones to have.

Kristine Pearson replied that reduced power consumption to improve battery life, phones that were not ‘over-engineered’ and phones with larger screens and improvements to allow touch operation would help people with bad eyesight but who were too poor to afford glasses.

Bruce Girard added that devices designed for use in developed counties were not always suitable for those in developing countries and that phones which came with open source software were valuable since they made it possible for specialist end users to develop applications to solve their problems.

Seema B Nair said it would be valuable if telephones could include access in local languages and that she would like to see some kind of user interface for which illiteracy would not be a barrier to operation.

Mutasim Abdeldadir from Sudan related another positive experience in that, before programmes on UNICEF and UNESCO rural radio, girls had not been allowed to go to school after reaching nine years of age. Since exposure to radio programmes on the topic it has been noted that more girls were being allowed to attend school beyond that age. There had also been health education benefits. “Community radio comes first,” said Mutasim.

A delegate suggested that governments, especially in the region, did not like community radio since they found it threatening. Some authorities thought that a mobile phone in the hands of a reporter was a recipe for disaster. In India the BBC had trained female reporters who were not allowed to report. He asked what was being done to ensure that communities had access to programming and not just to filler music.

The chairman mentioned that, in India, he had asked for an increase in local radio as long as 32 years ago and now it was happening. It had taken all that time to succeed and it was true that governments often did not like freedom of expression and freedom of speech. The best hope was that media personnel should practice true principles and gain trust as professionals. Only then could they stand up, as they must, and exercise their rights.

Mr Sharad Sadhu, ABU said that it was impressive to see the Lifeline radio set but that in this part of the world there were also some very small hand cranked radios available, costing only a few dollars. UNESCO had also funded the transmission-cum-studio device known as ‘Radio-In–A-Box’, which could be seen on demonstration at the Global Knowledge Forum exhibition. This device could be very valuable for community radio. He had thought that community radio was for the empowerment of the community to make their own programmes in the way they wanted to make them. It now appeared that some of the approaches mentioned by the panel indicated something different. He asked if such intervention, for whatever reason, was in the true spirit of community radio.

Bruce Girard wondered if this arose from his reference to acting as an intermediary between the community and the Internet. However the people involved were from the community itself. In his view it was not something that had been imposed but something that was happening very organically and naturally and was very good.

Seema B Nair said that since ‘Any Time Any place’ was being discussed, it was a matter of available infrastructure There was no question of going against the principles of community radio but of ensuring a match between the technology and what the community wanted to do with it.

Mr Bayero Agabi from Africa Independent Television, Nigeria, said that in connection with using hand sets to transmit radio programming he had been expecting to hear more about regulatory problems. In Nigeria there were more telephone hand sets than radio sets and this might be a better tool to deliver radio. When a company had tried to deliver hand-held TV it had been obstructed by regulation. Mr Agabi suggested that although we referred to convergence, the greater challenge was to allow the converging technologies to operate freely and collaboratively. He had hoped that the panel would touch on this huge issue.

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.

A rapidly growing number of people in the OECD countries listen to radio content of their choice through podcasts on their iPods or other MP3 players. This allows them to have access to high quality content in the area of their specific interest and at a time and place that doesn’t conflict with their work and obligations. What about the developing world? Is there a scope to use MP3 players beyond urban music consumption, particularly to make specific high quality content available to the poor and people in remote areas? What could be the role of public service broadcasters who have a competitive advantage in providing trusted high quality content? The panellists will discuss some encouraging first lessons and trends in a global and local context that is shaped by media convergence.

The session will be chaired by Dr. Abdul Waheed Khan, Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information, UNESCO and the speakers are:

• Bruce Girard, Expert in community radio and local media, Comunica
• Seema B. Nair, Project Leader UNESCO India
• Kristine Pearson, Chief Executive, Freeplay Foundation

This is the WEMF’s 3rd meeting. The first and second ones which were held in Geneva in 2003 and Tunis in 2005, in conjunction with the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). The Forums are World Broadcasting Union events and this third Forum is being organised in Asia by the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union (ABU), in collaboration with the Asia-Pacific Institute for Broadcasting Development (AIBD) and the Asian Media Information and Communication Centre (AMIC). The theme of the third meeting is A new vision of broadcasting in the information society.

The 3rd WEMF is being held in parallel with the 3rd Global Knowledge Conference, also in Kuala Lumpur on 11-13 December.

The WEMF website describes the event:

The 3rd World Electronic Media Forum (WEMF3) will bring together broadcast executives, policy makers, academics, journalists, visionaries and decision makers from around the world. They will look at the fundamental changes taking place in the global information society, and discuss how these will affect the role of the electronic media as well as the dissemination of knowledge, economic and business practices, political engagement and other aspects of society.

Download the draft programme from the WEMF website (15/11/2007)