Last Tuesday it was 9 degrees at 9am in orderly Johannesburg and 28 degrees with sweat inducing humidity at 7pm in chaotic Dar. After negotiating the jam-packed arrivals hall we smiled in relief when we discovered John holding up a torn piece of cardboard with Freedom Fone scribbled on it. We couldn't speak Swahili and he couldn't speak English but we made our greetings and jumped into his car for the ride of our life to a lodge off the Old Bagamoyo Road in Michokeni B.

Dar was thrillingly alive, jumping with activity of all kinds. Flashing past us . . .

Two guys on a bicycle. One of them had a goat draped over his knees. A beggar with buckled legs dragged himself through an intersection, craning his neck to ask for money from people in cars. He wore slip slops on his hands. The storm water drains on the sides of the roads were full of water breeding malaria and other diseases. Little boys' trawled homemade fishing lines through the muddy ditch water hoping for a catch. We saw a young man fill a water bottle from the litter-strewn canal, and we hoped that he wasn't going to drink it.

The next day we met up with Bart, Margaret and Lilian the Farm Radio International (FRI) crew who we'd come to train to use the Freedom Fone software.

FRI is a Canadian-based, not-for-profit organization working with about 300 radio broadcasters in 39 African countries to fight poverty and food insecurity. FRI has partnered with Freedom Fone to engage our software in the support of small scale farmers in Tanzania. FRI have established 5 listening communities attached to 5 community radio stations in varied locations in Tanzania. These community radio stations broadcast programmes that assist farmers in achieving better yields as well as helping answer questions related to the various agricultural challenges they might be experiencing. FRI is currently exploring the use of information communication technologies to complement and extend the usefulness of radio broadcast programmes.

They selected Radio Maria, a Christian radio station based in Dar es Salaam, to deploy Freedom Fone. Three main reasons influenced their decision to do this:

- Radio Maria is a well-resourced radio station both in terms of human resources with high technical skills and experience, and equipment/infrastructure.
- Radio Maria broadcasts some of FRI's agricultural programmes.
- Radio Maria has very wide coverage in Tanzania.

FRI's listening groups with Radio Maria have expressed a particular desire for information about raising chickens. Local chickens are an excellent income source for small-scale farmers, as they have low input costs and high demand and a ready market. However, many farmers experience high chicken loss due to poor management: not keeping the chickens safely, feeding them properly or looking after their hygiene sufficiently. Better information helps farmers lose fewer chickens, and thus make more money out of them. FRI's Freedom Fone deployment will draw on this desire for more information about chicken management, and their broadcast programme called, Heka Heka Vijijini (Busy Busy in the Village), will be adapted into short segment audio programmes using Freedom Fone software.

FRI also intends to use Freedom Fone in Ghana . . . stay tuned!

Lilian, the presenter of Heka Heka Vijijini (Busy Busy in the Village)

SochiReporter is getting ready to launch on the web and for mobile users. We spent the last three weeks fixing linguistic, technical and design bugs, all with the goal of maximizing ease of use.

So far we have drawn a fabulous group of people from both local and virtual communities: garage tech geeks and web schizophrenics, coffee-shop amateurs, and folks who want to use the site and offer feedback. Their comments have helped us to get better. We also attracted an avid gamer in Sochi who spends most of his time in an underground Internet café at the center of the city. He first took our Games Section (devoted to the preparation for the Winter Olympics) for a repository of Olympics-themed computer games, which was funny.

We are building the site using Drupal, a great platform. But the biggest challenge at this stage is that Drupal isn't as good at handling languages other than English. So our programmers had to invest a lot of energy into making it take Russian as a default language. In many cases, Drupal was unwilling to accept the correct phrases, and it especially disliked the cases (the correct endings of the Russian numeral adjectives). As for design, it is getting easier at this stage and we recently added magenta as our main color.

If you'd like to learn more about the story of SochiReporter so far, please watch this making-of video. It's about the 100-day process of creating the SochiReporter layouts.

SochiReporter by the numbers

Here are some numbers about our process so far: 7 designers, 11 versions of the logo, 17 pages and 3 backgrounds created, 1048 cups of green tea consumed, 17 nights per designer spent in discussions. We spent so much time discussing things because of the shared enthusiasm for the project, which often took the brainstorming deep into the night.

So, with only a bit of time left before the site is launched, here's an overview of some key details about SochiReporter:

• SochiReporter was a winner of the 2008 Knight News Challenge and is being implemented thanks to the grant from the Knight Foundation.
• SochiReporter is the first ever initiative to build a multimedia archive about the preparation of a host city for the Olympics.
• This is an experiment to help define the future of news. We hope to work out a successful business model as well as the accompanying website that will satisfy the community's information needs.
• This is a project aimed at supporting the Sochi community by enabling citizens to track and debate how the Olympic preparations are changing the city over a five-year period.
• The project will create a repository of multimedia resources and content about the preparation for the Olympics. It will document information that otherwise might be lost or not captured at all.
• The project will create a database of information and content that will be of interest to journalists who come to Sochi in 2014 to cover the Games.
• This project will help improve local traditional media and introduce them and the community to the concept of citizen multimedia journalism.
• The model being developed for SochiReporter will be able to be replicated in any country in the future, whether in connection with the Olympics or other similar grand events.

Most mobile phone applications now use these newer channels of communication -- SMS and data. But even though we sometimes forget, voice is still a major part of mobile phone communications. And when it comes to performing social work, voice communication is actually the most important feature in many parts of the world. I'm going to profile some of the most interesting of these initiatives, but first it's important to understand why voice is playing such an important role.

Voice has a big advantage over SMS and data transmissions because it channels spoken  language directly. People of varying literacy levels are able to use voice technology with keypad and voice navigation, and this means applications can be run in local languages. Users can issue commands and requests and thus communicate more effectively. The downside of using voice comes on the receiving end. Voice data is much harder to process than text or other data. It requires considerable technical effort (or a lot of people power) to parse and separate voice data. Even then, the accuracy isn't perfect. Searching through voice data also remains a near-impossible feat. On top of that, airtime costs tend to run higher with voice than for text message.

Yet, even with these challenges, there are several notable projects that leverage the voice capabilities of mobile phones to deliver important information in interesting ways.

Question Answering Services

Two of the more notable projects provide a very simple service: they answer people's questions.

Question Box provides a service in India and Uganda. In India, phone boxes are installed in slums and villages that connect users to operators that will answer questions. In Uganda, users can call in from any mobile phone and ask their questions. The operators have access to a repository of previously asked questions (and their answers), and they can also occasionally consult the Internet. A special search engine and database were also built specifically for the project.

Another initiative, Avaaj Otalo, provides an audio community forum for farmers in rural Gujarat, India. Working with an organization that produced a popular radio program, Otalo provides a call-in number where farmers can exchange questions and answers. Users are also able to listen to archives of the radio program.

These projects differ in that Question Box avoids having to process users' questions by adding a human listener in the loop; Avaaj Otalo avoids processing by organizing their collection of audio prompts with into a menu. Both programs, however, have yet to deal with the problem of cost because they subsidize the service for users. Otalo operates with a toll-free number and Question Box provides the phones to call from in India. In Uganda, Grameen Community Knowledge Workers provides the mobile phones.

Wikipedia and News on the Phone

MobilED, which operates in South African schools, developed a program that delivered Wikipedia content via mobile phones. Users texted in a query and were called back by a speech synthesizer that read the text of the relevant Wikipedia entry. Users could also upload voice-based edits to articles, or create audio entries if nothing existed on a given topic. The queries were easier to handle because they were text-based, but the information delivery utilized voice in order to deliver the entry and ensure comprehension. Unfortunately, the service was expensive to maintain and MobilED eventually abandoned the project in favor of purely data-based services.

FreedomFone, a Knight-funded project based in Zimbabwe, is working on providing news using an audio channel. In an environment where the press is highly censored and access to news is scant, FreedomFone plans to implement a solution so users can either call or text and receive the latest news information. The cost structure has yet to be determined.

Recreating the Web, or Wikis Over Audio

Perhaps the most ambitious project is IBM's Spoken Web (also known as the World Wide Telecom Web) Project. The idea is to create an all-audio version of the web. The project aims to create voice-sites that are linked to specific phone numbers, much in the way a website has a URL. The project has already built a system called VoiceGen that creates VoiceXML content from an audio input. The group deployed part of the technology in the form of VoiKiosks, a service that allowed users to listen to information from different NGOs and upload professional advertisements. It proved to be a popular test service.

The Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is also developing audio wikis, or "local repositories of audio information," that can be edited and created using audio. It essentially recreates wikis on a mobile-accessible audio platform. The system is not fully developed, but is expected to be deployed in India in conjunction with Microsoft Research India.

The barriers to voice services

Voice communication offers several benefits, especially when it comes to low literacy consumers. The question, then, is why voice-based technologies are not more of a player in the world today? The automation of these types of service is difficult, but Question Box, Avaaj Otalo, and IBM have shown that challenges can be overcome.

Cost seems to be the biggest issue when it comes to deploying and maintaining these services. MobilED ended its voice-based program because of cost. It's important to note, however, that airtime is particularly expensive in South Africa. The International Telecommunication Union reported in 2008 that costs for one minute of on-network airtime during peak hours was the equivalent of U.S. $0.59 when calculated using purchasing power parity. Airtime is much more affordable in India. The same minute in India costs only U.S. $0.07. Hopefully, this will encourage other voice-based mobile services in India, and we can eventually see the cost issue resolved once and for all.

Photo courtesy of gopal1035 on Flickr, CC BY 2.0.

Here is a brief video (by film makers Paula Aguilera and Jonathan Williams) that gives a sense of the flavor of FNFCM09.

Laxmi was amazed that there is no equivalent on the Internet to paying for a postage stamp to send a letter. The first twenty minutes of this workshop on digi-activism being held in Goa, India were over her head, but when she saw her own language, Telugu, appear on the Google.co.in search page, she jumped to attention. For the first time, Laxmi is seeing something on the Internet that she can actually read. She smiles and begins chattering away in her own language as she reads through the search results for "human rights" on the Google Telugu page.

Laxmi is a community producer with a community video unit in Andhra Pradesh called Manyam Praja Video. All of its producers are so-called "tribals," meaning they are members of India's indigenous communities that live mostly in the remote mountainous parts of the country. Laxmi was one of 130 participants at Video Volunteers' (VV) 5-day Community Video Training Camp held at a resort in Goa from August 11 to 14. Roughly half of the participants were VV's community video producers. Other participants included college students studying journalism and communications and workers in NGOs.

Participants signed up for different workshops on topics including music videos, creative camera work, digi-activism, silent film, video blogging and animation. Each morning and evening featured presentations by different community media groups and media activists, and the last two days featured panel discussions with academics and NGO leaders.

When Mary Joyce, an workshop instructor and the founder of digiactive.org., was observing Laxmi, she understood her challenge for the rest of the workshop -- to balance the amazing skills and experience she can share from her days working for the Obama campaign's new media department with the needs of some participants who were seeing the Internet for the first time in their lives.

In the next room next to her, instructors Kamayani Bali and Freeman Murray were projecting videos made by the community video producers in attendance. The producers were amazed when they saw their work on YouTube.

"12,000 people watched our video! Youth can change things!" one said.

"Can you translate the comments?" asked another.

The instructors obliged and translated the comments. "This is democracy in action," read one comment. "Media that is of, for and by the people."

Another person commented that "You, Samta [the producer] are a hero to young girls. You give a voice to those who aren't heard."

A video about the demolition of slum houses sparked a typical Internet rant about the "filthy people in the slums," and some of the producers who live in those slums were introduced to the whole concept of freedom of speech on the web.

For the past two years, VV had been bringing our community video producers together for joint training workshops. This year, we wanted to widen the group of participants to include NGOs and students who'd expressed interest in community media, or were carrying out successful projects of their own. We'd talked about the idea of community video as a movement, and we wanted to test out that concept. The response was overwhelming: more than 250 people applied for only 130 seats. We had applications from roughly 55 NGOs from all over India, all of whom want to get into community video.

Below is a brief rundown of what happened.

Workshops

All participants were assigned to different tracks such as music videos, creative camera work, digi-activism, video blogging, silent film and animation. Each of these workshops was led by an outside facilitator, such as well-known documentary filmmaker Paromita Vohra and Bollywood director Arjun Bali.

These tracks were all areas that producers had previously asked to learn about. Freed from their usual pressures of making work with a focus on social change, these workshops on "fun" subjects like animation and music videos stimulated their creativity in fantastic ways. In each workshop, the participants made 3 to 4 videos that were later screened on the last night of the workshop. Many of the videos were funny and clearly inspired by Bollywood. They also had a strong romantic subtext. Watching all 20 videos together on the final night gave everyone a tremendous sense of accomplishment.

The videoblogging workshop had producers create a video blog where each week they would select one online video that relates to a specific theme. The exercise was simply to search YouTube for videos of water, for example, and select the one they liked best. But for people who were seeing the Internet for the first time, this process opened up their minds to new possibilities. One learning I took away from the workshop is that we must get the community video units online because it can help them conduct independent research and learning.

For those of us at Video Volunteers who have put so much emphasis on developing the critical thinking skills of the community producers, it was really important to see what a shared learning environment would be like. The mixing of groups turned out really well. The NGO workers became convinced of the potential of community video when they worked side by side with such articulate, empowered individuals.

The producers, some of whom had had traveled on a train for the first time in their lives to attend the workshop, had a chance to make videos with people who had a high level of expertise and life experience.

As for the college students? Well, the typical response was, "I've studied film for three years, and I've seen hundreds more films than they have, yet these community producers know so much more than me."

Another response I heard was, "When I saw their videos, all my stereotypes went away. I had no idea they would be making films better than our own student projects."

Another volunteer expressed it quite simply: "I'm humbled."

For the producers, the positive feedback they received was immensely motivating and confidence-building. The conversations that took place around the poolside bar each evening between the community producers and the highly experienced facilitators gave everyone a sense of being valued professionals.

This was only a small experiment. But it certainly made me feel that universities and schools could successfully put students with formal and informal education in the same classrooms.

Panels

The two days of panels started off with producers from each community video unit telling "impact stories." Neeru, a young Dalit producer from Gujarat, recounted what had happened to her a few weeks back.

She was making a film about migration that described how people need to leave the villages for work. The "call to action" of the film was that people should access the government's program that guarantees 100 days of employment to all rural unemployed, as this is a way to stem migration. On her own accord, Neeru led a rally of villagers to her local government employment office. Three hundred people joined her in the rally and demanded work. The government officials tried to push her -- and especially her camera -- out of the office, but they persevered.

The next day, all 300 people were given work assignments. It was apparent through Neeru's breathless retelling of the story, which included details about her background and childhood, that she feels deeply about the importance of what occurred.

On August 13th, we held a one-day panel for Goan activists and journalists to discuss how community video could be strengthened in Goa, a place where Video Volunteers only recently arrived.

Newspaper editors from three different papers had a healthy debate about whether the Goan press is representative of, and responsive to, community needs. In many ways, the Goan press is better than the press in other parts of India because Goa has strong social movements with support from a large middle class. It is therefore in the interest of the papers to fill the need for community organizing.

However, as anti-mining activist Sebastian Rodriguez pointed out, most papers are owned by the mining industry, which is the biggest player in the local economy. The editors acknowledged this and added that they are not allowed to report on anti-mining activity.

On August 14th, we had a panel on how community media in India can become sustainable and scalable. Rajen Varada of Unesco talked about the business models the government is using to scale the Internet kiosk model to a national level. Dominic D'Souza, director of Laya, VV's partner organization, gave tips to other NGOs who are thinking of starting Community Video Units. Vinod Pavarala, the dean of the S N School of Communications in Hyderabad, spoke about the history of community media in India and talked about how colleges can better equip students to be facilitators of community media. I presented VV's new community journalism program as a possible way to scale community video and partner with the mainstream media for financial sustainability.

Sajan Venniyoor from All India Radio explained government policies around community television and public access broadcasting. Many of the people present had been active in the successful struggle for community radio licenses, and we discussed whether community television is a cause that media activists should rally around. If community television is made legal in India, we can equip the community video units to broadcast within a 20 mile radius for roughly $10,000 per CVU.

Focus Groups on Sustainability in Community Media

Each morning from 7.30 a.m. to 8.30 a.m., we conducted focus groups to discuss how community video can earn revenue. VV recently started a research project with the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, India's leading business school, to investigate if community video groups can become financially sustainable through partnerships with mainstream media and local communities. On the morning I attended, we discussed the benefits and possible pitfalls of sharing the financial details of a CVU with the communities they work in. We also talked about how CVUs could receive donated space and rent from the community much in the way that one our partners in Andhra Pradesh does with their community TV centers.

Morning and Evening Group Presentations

The participants met each morning and afternoon in a big hall for group sessions. Different groups, such as Amnesty International's Asia campaigns, the Modern Story Project, and the Maraa Media Collective in Bangalore, presented their work. The community producers also performed skits, street plays and music performances that they had prepared in advance.

The highlight of these sessions was a presentation by the community filmmakers from Malegaon. Malegaon is a largely Muslim town south of Bombay where local people have started their own small film industry to make spoofs of Bollywood films. Their latest film, "Superman in Malegaon," is their first attempt to take on Hollywood. It features a shambling, bathroom slipper-wearing Superman.

This small film industry, run by director Nasir Shaikh and Akram Shaik, the actor who plays the lead villain in the films, is an amazing community media success story. They mobilize local talent in order to celebrate -- and poke fun at -- local communities. Their films cost about $500 to make, and they fund them via local DVD sales and people paying to be featured in the videos.

This group is the subject of a fantastic documentary by Faiza Ahmad Khan that has been winning tons of awards. Amazingly, this was the first time that they had been invited to speak about their work and share their techniques for low cost media production. They left Goa with a huge new fan base. We're proud to have given them the first platform to share the details of their work. We're also incredibly grateful to them for teaching the community producers about humor, drama and entertainment.

A different kind of sustainability

Overall, perhaps the strongest impression that stayed with people was the sense of family shared by the producers. Rob Goddin of Amnesty told me how impressed he was by the sustainability of this model. I thought he meant financial sustainability, but he corrected me and said that the real sustainability was the commitment and dedication of the young producers.

We have learned that the success of the community video unit rests on the intellectual curiosity of the participants. Their jobs are very tough. They not only make the films, but are responsible for showing them and ensuring that they have an impact. These people are filmmakers and social workers, which is more than most filmmakers can say.

As members of their community, they navigate pitfalls and prejudices that an outsider wouldn't encounter. Celebrating their work is critical to keeping them motivated and sustaining the entire process. So too is building a sense of community and friendship. The singing, music-playing, dancing and skit-making sessions that went on late into the night will be the single most important experience that for some of the producers and participants.

In order to recognize the amazing work they're done, we organized the "C-Oscars," or "Community Oscars," and handed out awards for best impact, best filming, best editing and best online videos, among others.

We also made sure the conference was held in a nice place -- a resort with a pool and access to the beach -- in order to provide them with another reward. We had to explain that they should complain if something didn't work in their room We also told them that every day, perhaps for the first time in their lives, someone would come in to clean their rooms.

We also took a moment to celebrate two marriages between producers. One couple consists of a girl from the slums in Mumbai and a boy from rural Gujarat, a highly unlikely pair. Off-stage, the two young husbands talked to Mahima, a reporter from Delhi, about their choices of wives. "Because we worked together with these girls in the CVU, we know how talented they are," one said, "and we will never treat them like housewives who are supposed to be our servants."

There are some things that we will do differently next year. Translation and language is an issue that must be dealt with, because each workshop required simultaneous translation into three languages. We wish we'd been more successful in bringing in more local Goans, because this was a chance for us to announce our presence in Goa. Next year we will also try to bring in more funding agencies, directors of journalism schools, and people from mainstream media.

Overall, the workshop was a great success. Hard-working staff and volunteers handled the logistics and people are filled with enthusiasm about the idea of community video. This is the beginning of a movement.

"This workshop changed my life," said one young man from an NGO in Delhi and Assam. "Before I came here, I thought communications was just something an NGO needed to do. But now I see how it can change people's lives."

Our friend Rajen from Unesco told us, "What you guys have here is the groundswell of support from the grassroots. This is the thing that is missing from other similar efforts. Now if you can keep growing this groundswell, and simultaneously others can work at a policy level to gain more support for programs that empower people with a voice, then real change can be created."

In the next few weeks, we'll be creating a Wikispace site with all the workshop materials for modification and addition by others. You can also read two articles (1, 2) about the workshop.

Just weeks away from launching my Knight News Challenge project, SochiReporter.ru, I organized a seminar for third, fourth and fifth year students from the five leading Sochi-based universities. Thirty-five journalism and IT students participated in the two day seminar called "Web and Journalism: The New Trends." We received press coverage in over 30 online publications, in newspapers and from three of the city's leading TV channels. Clearly, this city, which will host the 2014 Olympic Winter Games, is ready to embrace new ways of reporting and sharing information.

The seminar was held on July 30 and 31 at the peak of the hot Black Sea summer, and at a time when the students are on break from their studies. We invited them to come learn about new media and share their experiences and knowledge. Most of the students turned out to be active web users who already had profiles on the leading Russian social networks. That was a good sign.

Presentation of SochiReporter

On the first day, I gave a lecture about the state of traditional and new media. I also discussed multimedia storytelling principles, demonstrated the difference between a newspaper article and a blog post, and talked about how to choose a topic for a blog, build its audience, and make it successful. The students definitely showed interest in blogging. We also focused on international user-generated content and citizen journalism projects, and the way Web 2.0 is empowering people worldwide.

My session culminated in a multimedia presentation about the SochiReporter project: its concept, structure, design, use of Web 2.0 tools, innovative features, and the opportunities the website offers the citizens of Sochi as they prepare to host the 2014 Winter Olympics.

One goal of the seminar was to let the students, who are the most active web users in Sochi, be the first to learn about the project. We also want to give them the tools and knowledge needed to document and report on the changes in their city. SochiReporter is the first ever initiative to build a multimedia archive about the preparation of a host city for the Olympics. We expect to have many contributions from students.

SochiReporter's First Partners

Joining me as a presenter at the seminar was Sergey A. Stalnov, the director of public relations for Kodak Russia. He gave an exciting lecture on the invention, development and current state of photography in the digital age. One highlight came when we discovered that there was a 12-year-old girl in the hall with us. We presented her with a free camera, much the same way that Kodak did in 1930 when it introduced the Eastman Anniversary camera. To celebrate its 50th anniversary, the company gave away roughly 500,000 cameras to 12 year olds in Canada and the U.S.

After that, each student introduced themselves and shared ideas about how they could contribute to the project. At the end of the first day, the students were given 20 portable HD Kodak Zx1 video cameras (they're waterproof, which is an important feature in a seaside city like Sochi) and 10 voice recorders, all of which were provided by Kodak and Olympus, SochiReporter's first partners. The students chose topics and themes to cover using the new devices and headed out into the field. On the second day, they presented their work. These stories and photographs will be the first content available at SochiReporter when the project launches in September.

The students showed a lot of enthusiasm and seem to be excited about the project. "I acquired new multimedia reporting skills at the seminar," said Artem Shehovtsov, a student at the Sochi Institute of Information Technologies. "I definitely think that SochiReporter is a breakthrough, a really timely project for our city, which is now in constant change. I am anticipating SochiReporter's launch [in order] to start uploading my content."

At the end of the two days, each student was given a certificate commemorating their participation. They also received T-shirts decorated with the project's logo and a few words that I hope they will take to heart: "I am a SochiReporter."

 
GRINS setup at Radio Bundelkhand

• Playlist Management: GRINS now allows the staff at Radio Bundelkhand to not only prepare and save a playlist, but to also schedule a playlist for automatic transmission on air at a specified time in the future. As a result, there is no need for a person to be present near the computer to start the transmission. Other features like display of start time for each item in the playlist and the ability to preview items in the playlist while another item is playing on air have provided convenience to the staff.
• Content Management: One of the primary concerns at Radio Bundelkhand was the need for a mechanism to manage content created by the station. GRINS enables content management by allowing users to save metadata regarding programs present in the system and to search for them at a later date.
  • Users can store a variety of information like language of the program, details of creators of the program, description of the program, trivia about the program, and so on. Different categories can also be assigned to programs based on its content. For example, a program regarding an interview with a doctor on polio vaccination could be assigned categories of "interview" and "health". Once metadata information has been fed for programs, searching for them becomes extremely easy with our "facet" based search engine.
  • GRINS library search engine allows one to search for programs based on several independent aspects or "facets". One could search for programs based on length of the program, categories assigned to the programs, trivia or description of the program, and so on, each of them reducing the search results independent of the other. Effectively the results thus obtained are a logical AND of all the constraints specified by the user. The ability of a user to search programs using constraints of so many types allows him/her to specify very powerful search queries. This is particularly useful when the content database grows very large. Once programs of desired kind have been searched for, GRINS allows users to obtain group statistics of the searched programs. These group statistics include total number of hours the searched programs have been on air, cumulative frequency of transmission of the searched programs, etc.
• Diagnostics: One of our main concerns with deployment of GRINS at Radio Bundelkhand was the unavailability of a local expert with knowledge of GRINS. This is expected to be the case at most radio stations even for the future. This meant that in case of any kind of failure of the system, the station staff would be helpless. To avoid this kind of a scenario, GRINS includes a "Diagnostics Widget" that allows a user to diagnose the reachability of all "services" and connectivity of audio cables. A diagnostic test like this could be run by the station staff before a transmission to ensure that everything is in order. We believe this feature would significantly offset the unavailability of local manpower with knowledge of GRINS. The true value of this feature will become known as and when more deployments are done and the system is used for longer periods.
• Robustness: In order to ensure that local staff could rely on GRINS, it was imperative that GRINS be robust in failure detection, resilience to network failures, and ensure recoverability with the least disruption. Significant effort was put in to ensure online detection of failure of many components of the system, resilience to temporary network failures, and recoverability in case a service encountered an unexpected error. Anecdotally, as can be seen in the picture below, the "magic box" and the switch connecting the "magic box" with the computer running the user interface was placed near the feet of the staff during the first week when the system for being deployed and tested! Given the situation it was quite conceivable that a slight kick to the network cables could cause temporary loss of connectivity.

 
Network hub and GRINS under the table, installed dangerously close to feet

• Transmission Logging: GRINS logs programs that are played out on air. The staff therefore need not maintain a large archive of all audio that is played out on air. A "Log View Widget" allows them to simply look at all the programs played out between any two dates. This ensures that Government regulations can be met with the least effort.

We will keep working very closely with the staff at Radio Bundelkhand to ensure that there are no technical problems faced by the station. Our next visit to the station will happen very soon when we will deliver several minor features requested by the station staff. We will also collect logs of operation of GRINS at the station for further analysis.

Our next major upgrade will add telephony capabilities to GRINS. With these capabilities, the staff at Radio Bundelkhand will be able to accept phone calls and record conversations. Currently Radio Bundelkhand accepts song requests for only one hour during the day, where a staff member receives the call manually and records the conversation on a recorder by keeping the call on a speaker phone. With telephony capabilities, the station will be able to accept song requests throughout the day in an automated manner without the staff having to manually receive calls and talk to the caller.

We also intend to collect logs from the radio station periodically over the next one year to study if the system experiences any performance or robustness issues. In the long run, this would provide us with information regarding stability of the system.

Up and running in a day!

Myself and Zahir reached Orchha on the 13th morning. We had a short meeting with Ms Anujaa (Station Manager - who handles bulk of the administrative work and also finds time to guide the reporters in their content creation), Mr Ashok Shukla (he is the top technical guy here and a jack of all trades!), and Mr Amit (who works closely with the reporters on content production). We took a few hours to set up our box, and figure out the cabling in such a way that the computer used for running the front end of our system could also be used for their usual production work. It seems they do have access to audio and computer related equipments of decent quality, through the city of Jhansi (Jhansi is about 16kms from Orchha). We could get some of the reporters to work on the system from time to time. We used the feedback from them to fix some usability bugs and improve the general stability of the system. These activities of testing, feedback and updating the system went on in parallel for the better part of the week we spent there.

The young reporters

One has to experience the infectious enthusiam and high motivation levels of these young reporters in person. They are mostly in the late teens to early twenties age group. They are a friendly, confident and talented bunch of people. Belonging to the villages near Orchha, they are able to connect with the local population and draw them out. Writing scripts for their own programmes is well within their comfort zone, and so is working on the computer to create audio content. They are quite proficient in using Audacity for their editing needs, and before GRINS was installed, relied on winamp for playing out their content on-air. The old system will be used as a backup for a few weeks before they come to rely solely on GRINS. Even though they are interested and motivated to learn new things, they face some barriers in knowledge acquisition. On the production side, their toolset is mostly limited to Audacity and some audio format convertion tools and the like. Content management is a tough nut with files stored in difficult to navigate folders. GRINS should be able to help them with this bit. I suspect that even a short training session on the variety of production tools available should do them great help. They have the inquisitiveness to explore things and follow things up on their own. So far, the training they have received has been on field work. They were unfamiliar with the concepts behind audio mixers and were not confident in their knowledge of the connections and configurations of their existing setup.

Content production

They do not have adequate access to quality content which they could use as raw materials for their content production. The nearest public library is in Jhansi (about 16 kms away), which, apparently serves mostly old content. They have access to an unreliable internet connection, but even when connectivity is available, they are unable to make effective use of it since most of them are not conversant in English. I think we should try to make quality content available in local languages. Lack of access to experts in fields like basic sciences is yet another reason why they are unable to produce radio content related to such fields. They were quite taken in by the 3D interactive globe on my KDE desktop. They found kstars quite interesting too. I believe we could make localized versions of similar educational software available to these students. I suspect software like Celestia, Kgeography, and Parley will turn out to be immensely popular! Next time Gram Vaani visits Radio Bundelkhand, we will be carrying some of these software with us.

We got a chance to watch them make a programme on the solar eclipse (July 22). They aimed to counter prevalent superstitions on the subject. Through discussions and reading articles from magazines, they quickly built up their own knowledge and promptly recorded a fifteen minute programme. We chimed in with our knowledge of Earth, Universe and Everything. (And yes Nishi, you were right, Proxima Centauri is the nearest star to the sun, while Alpha Centauri is the nearest star system. My bad.). She was pretty comfortable with her astronomy, since she had a chance to brush up on it when she prepared for the Railways Examination. All this happened under the watchful eyes of Shuklaji, who gave them a few suggestions on how to structure the show. His ability to contribute to things both technical and non-technical is invaluable to this station.

Bundeli Idol and advertisements

Radio Bundelkhand regularly broadcasts programmes on agriculture, folk songs, career opportunities, heritage and life of women. Recently, they have started airing advertisements too. The reporters themselves put in effort to bring in these ads which could potentially be a good source of revenue. Broadcast of an advertisement of a particular horticultural nursery seemed to get the attention of nearby local businesses and more of them have expressed their desire to broadcast their own ads. Amit had come up with an idea to have a Bundeli Idol contest which has generated a lot of interest from the public. We attended one of the audition sessions in the village of Niwari, about 30kms from Orchha. They had about 35 participants coming in that day, and fifteen more on the following day. The make-shift studio was an office belonging to Taragram. RB had taken a few instruments with them which the participants could use. They are required to sing Bundeli (local dialect) songs for the contest. Those who are selected in this round would be called up and invited for a recording session at the station. They have worked out the format of the competition and arranged for judges. The daily transmission time was to be extended by half an hour to accomodate this programme. This programme would give a boost to their collection of Bundeli songs.

What's next

We will visit Orchha pretty soon. During our next visit, we will add some minor features that were requested by our friends here. We will also make arrangements for getting the application logs that are created here back to Delhi. In another two to three months we should be here again with our brand new telephony related widgets. It should help them with running contests like Bundeli Idol, where the viewers can vote via SMS or through the telephone. Telephony service would also help them in disseminating basic information like programme schedules, without engaging the time of any of their staff members.

Public Radio Player, the new version of the old Public Radio Tuner, is a free application that allows users to access more than 300 radio stations across the country. With a few swipes to the screen of an iPhone or iPod Touch, users can listen to live shows or recorded podcasts from locations of their choice. The app is a collaboration led by Public Radio Exchange (PRX), with National Public Radio, American Public Media, Public Interactive and Public Radio International, and funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

With 1.8 million downloads to date (including Public Radio Tuner, the previous version), the app has given thousands of listeners access to stations and favorite shows -- like Marketplace, Prairie Home Companion and This American Life -- without the geographical limitations of a radio signal.

Relationship between listeners and stations

But while increasing listeners, the app has initiated a conversation about funding for public radio stations and the responsibility of listeners to their local station. In his piece on PaidContent, Rafat Ali wrote, "All of this adds to the issues surrounding local public radio funding in the digital age: If a large number of iPhone app users are not necessarily listening in to the local station, then loyalties start to shift, or even fade away, which in turn affects donations to the local stations."

Jake Shapiro, founder and executive director of PRX, told me that he's not surprised by the controversy. "I think there are definitely some things that this kind of application will provoke," he said. "It does stretch the relationship between listeners and their stations."

But eventually, he would like the app to evolve into something that supports public radio in a different way.

"Our hope and belief is that it expands and grows the total audience for public radio," he said. "Although there's a big question of how to translate that functionality into something that is convenient at the producer and station level."

Ideally, Shapiro would like users to donate directly to the radio stations from their iPhone. With a simple click, a listener in Chicago could see that she was a frequent listener of WCPN in Cleveland, and donate to that station using the credit card stored on her iTunes account. But because Apple currently doesn't allow iTunes to be used for charitable purposes, this isn't an option.

"It's true there isn't much incentive for Apple to solve this," said Shapiro. "But we're hoping there's at least a moral case for how Apple should be involved."

And even if Apple did begin to allow for charitable donations, there is still the stipulation that only paid apps are allowed to have in-app transactions. Although PRX considered charging, they wanted to make the app available to the broadest possible audience. And they also didn't like the idea of Apple taking 30 percent of all payments.

Other ways to connect

Google's Android platform may also offer an easier way to connect users with their stations, said Shapiro. "You'd have the freedom to map however you wanted to do transactions, but not the seamless experience of Apple's ecosystem," he said. Although PRX is not actively working on an Android version, Shapiro said that there has been both discussion and demand. PRX is also working with Doc Searls, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, to develop a way to log user listening patterns and then encourage them to donate to their favorite stations.

And when it comes down to it, listener support is just one of several revenue sources -- taxes, corporate underwriting, philanthropy -- that keep public radio alive. If, at some point in the future, Public Radio Tuner would be able to change the landscape of public radio, Shapiro hopes that it will be for the better. Listeners might not want that free tote bag with the name of their local station, but by increasing public radio's audience and eventually letting people know what stations they're listening to, Public Radio Tuner will not only keep public radio alive, but help it to thrive.

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Listen to the full interview here (15:35) or right-click to download the mp3.

Full transcript follows, with links added:

Ryan: Hey this is Ryan Sholin here, I'm recording this today for PBS Idea Lab, and I'm here with Brian Conley of Alive in Baghdad. Brian, how are you doing this morning?

Brian: Pretty good. A little tired. Good to talk to you.

Ryan: Good to talk to you, too. Brian, I've been following what you've been doing since Alive in Baghdad and we crossed paths in person once in October 2007, but I've been seeing you pop up a lot in the last couple weeks as I follow what's going on in Iran...There's been a lot of talk about Twitter, but there's a lot of other ways that people in Iran have been trying to get their story out. Can you talk a little bit first just about your experience so far with Iran, and with Alive in Baghdad.

Brian: Yeah, so I basically come from the documentary film world. I went to Iraq back in '05 with the intention, basically, of producing a bunch of videos of Iraqis talking about what they were experiencing and that kind of expanded into an ongoing news and documentary program distributed by the Internet for the last three years. And then at the beginning of this year and last year, there was the most recent incursion by Israel into Gaza, and during that time we -- we being some other folks that I've collaborated with -- started looking at other tools that we could use just to get some news out. [That led to the Alive in Gaza blog.]

Actually, somebody later told me that we may have been the only international organization reporting from within Gaza. I don't know if that's exactly accurate, but what we were doing was using Skype and recording phone calls, interviews with...a journalist there, and trying to get emails from various Palestinians who were living there, via our coordinator of Alive in Baghdad, who actually, his family is originally from Gaza, although he's never been there, or hasn't been there since he was very young.

Ryan: So while you weren't on the ground in Gaza, you had connections who were, and were able to get information out, too.

Brian: Exactly, and then we used Twitter to pull in questions from people and enable people to sort of interact with our guy on the ground there. So then when Iran started happening it seemed like a natural fit to try and use the same tools for the folks there, to enable them to basically communicate out. The primary thing that we're trying, that we're pushing right now, is basically a phone number that people can call, get to a voicemail box and record whatever they would like to say, and right now I have a public voice mailbox available via an Alive in Tehran Facebook [group].

Also, people can message me via twitter.com/baghdadbrian and then for people who are more private or who have family, they just want to share one voicemail box...we can set up a specific number for any individual. Beyond that, we're looking at other tools. I've learned a little bit about how Students for a Free Tibet have gotten video out of Tibet. So there's one tool I'm sort of sharing with people privately. Then there on Alive in Tehran we have a list of tools Iranians can use to communicate securely. So basically, right now it's a lot of organizing and working it.

Ryan: So, to get information out and have it be valuable and valid, part of that is protecting, for example, that phone number, protecting the message and the exact numbers that you're using, otherwise...Do you feel like it would be prone to the sort of -- I don't want to say abuse -- but the broad range of uses that a Twitter hashtag is subject to because it's completely public?

Brian: Yeah, so the thing about it is that we do have a voicemail box that's completely public. I'm more concerned about that number getting shut down...or that number being tracked, sort of listened into. All those recordings go to one source, and I can listen through them, or have somebody else on our end listen through them before we post them, so that way we can decide where to post them. At this point, unless something is really offensive and abusive, I'm pretty much planning to publish anything that I get there. I may create different categories or different sorting functions for it. For the website, I might create a pro- or an anti- category for the blog.

Right now, we have one guy who's been using the tool repeatedly, and he's just basically doing an update about what he's experiencing there, so that I'm just posting directly to the blog. And otherwise, to some degree, it's just a question of like, I don't know exactly how the technology works on Iran's end, but we know we've heard a lot about their Internet filtering capability. And it actually seems, surprisingly, that landlines may in fact be the safest mode of communication out of Iran right now. Other than encrypted email, which is, unless you do it right, you could end up screwing yourself without sort of realizing.

Ryan: So, this seemingly Dark Ages landline communication that's actually the most secure way to get a call out, once that gets out, you just said you're kind of moderating them. Where are you posting these? I know you mentioned you've got a call with somebody else just after this. I mean, are you trying to reach large news organizations and get out to places like NPR and the BBC to get this on the radio?

Brian: Yeah, I feel like I should be doing that, but right now, given that I've only had one guy who's regularly posting, I'm sort of trying to stay a little bit outside of the establishment press, and sort of say, 'here's a tool that we're giving people.' I'm hoping that people will come to me -- like what happened with this interview that I'm doing next is somebody from BBC's Pods and Blogs show and we'll see how it goes. To me, this is a long term view. That is: How do I start organizing now and get as much done today and [also] stay on this and keep it running, once everything kind of settles?

Honestly, I think that we have to look at the history, and recognize that in 1979, this so-called Islamic Revolution was actually a widespread, multi-ethnic, pluralistic uprising against the Shah, and it just so happened that the conservative Islamic faction was able to effectively control communication, silence its opponents, and come out on top. And that's really a question we have to be sure about today -- at Alive in Tehran, we have no interest in supporting one political candidate over another, or one political party over another. I'm literally just trying to figure out a way to build trust with Iranians and get them the tools to be able to report and speak about what's going on in their lives.

If somebody just wants to call and say "Hi, this is a message for my family in San Francisco, and I want them to know that I'm OK," that's fine with me. The hardest part of this work is getting people on the ground to take ownership and recognize that I'm not doing this with an ulterior motive. My goal is to get people to recognize that they have a voice, they have the tools, and whatever I can do to support them, I will. Obviously, at some point I need to be able to pay my rent and support my family, but that's not really the interest at the moment.

Ryan: You're trying to give these people a voice to get their message out at a moment where it's crucial and it's incredibly difficult...for those of us on this side of the ocean to figure out what's accurate and what's reasonable and what's reliable in terms of sources.

Brian: Right.

Ryan: But you're obligated, also, to play the role of the human editor for that. But on the other hand, you've got the difficulty of trying to get the people on the ground to use the tools.

Brian: Yeah, exactly. And I don't speak Farsi. I speak Arabic, but I don't speak Farsi. I don't really have any contacts there. I have a couple of contacts, it's sort of funny, because we did look into trying to set this up, back in...a couple of years back, sort of looking at doing a project in Iran, with a couple of filmmakers who are known over here and in the blogosphere. I got the impression that nobody wanted to be associated with a project called "Alive in Tehran" because it was too political. It seemed political, inherently.

And it is to some degree political, because we're making this statement that we don't necessarily need the foreign press to go and say "Live from Tehran, this is what you need to know." There are people who live in Iraq, they know what's going on. Especially in places like Iraq where so many people were educated as engineers, and were highly educated, they may not be journalists, but they know how to use the scientific method -- who, what, why, where, when, and how -- it's not hard as long as you can commit to it and be held to account by an editor. Or a fellow collaborator.

Ryan: So how is getting people on the ground involved different in Tehran than it is in Baghdad? In Baghdad, you were there -- you were there in person handing out cameras.

Brian: That's a big part of it, and also that I spent a year just learning about Iraq before I went...and learning about the culture and the people on the ground, and all that sort of thing. On the other hand, now with Alive in Tehran, I have three or four years of proven track record. I'm pretty sure that Alive in Baghdad has won more awards in Internet video than any other program. I have proven integrity that I can stand on. I can say to people on Twitter or on Facebook or wherever, 'My full name is Brian Conley, go to Google and search for me. I'm not the surfer, and I'm not the British comedian. I went to jail in China and I went to jail in Mexico and I went to jail in the United States, all to be able to support this ideal." And I think that goes a long way.

Ryan: Right, you definitely want people to click the first link [in the Google search results] and not the second two.

Brian: Yeah.

Ryan: Let me rewind for a second, can you tell us a little bit about Alive in Baghdad? And then we're going to wrap up and tell people how they can help you out now.

Brian: Alive in Baghdad had been until recently a weekly program about life in Iraq produced by Iraqi journalists and documentary filmmakers. At the beginning of this year, beginning of 2009, we sort of ran into a wall with funding. With Obama being elected, people's eyes were moving away from Iraq, and that made things difficult. We've had some trouble with translators who moved on to other work. And then we've had trouble locating other translators, given the small money that we're able to support for translating our content. We're still working on getting translation happening regularly again and hope to be producing soon -- hopefully by the beginning of July.

It's just been difficult going, and we really want to keep this thing going, but people in Iraq, we've always paid, and we need to be able to keep paying them to be able to keep that work coming. So it's really just a question of priorities and funding right now, and looking at some different things. But I definitely want people to know, it hasn't been regularly updated in the last few months, but Alive in Baghdad is still going, and we are still trying to keep producing new work.

Ryan: What kind of avenues are you looking at for funding? Non-profit? For-profit? How do you go about it?

Brian: Well, my wife and I just had a baby, and we've been on leave for the last several months.

Ryan: Congratulations!

Brian: Well, because of that, not much has moved forward, but I'm probably going to be looking into grants and that kind of funding. Most of our funding so far has just been donations, and every so often getting a deal to license our content, or to produce work for someone like the BBC or Sky News. But as the attention to Iraq has dropped, even more dramatically than it already had previously, it's been getting more difficult. I think really the best way to move forward is going to be to set up a not-for-profit organization and maybe to support all of this content collectively through a larger grant.

Ryan: That sounds really interesting. So let's get the URLs out there again for the people who are listening to this, and I'll get them into the post as well. Where can people find you, and where can people find Alive in Tehran?

Brian: Alive in Tehran is AliveinTehran.org and you can find out more about my previous work at AliveinBaghdad.org

SmallWorldNews.tv is our organizational website, where I'm mostly writing about theory and thoughts about journalism and different media tools that exist and how we can use them more effectively...Also, if people in Iran want to email posts to go directly to the blog, they can email to aliveintehranpost@gmail.com.

Ryan: That sounds great, Brian, thank you so much for your time today, and I hope that you're able to get a lot of the message out about what's going on in Tehran.

Brian: Thank you for having me.

Photo of Brian Conley by Simon Bierwald via Flickr.

A confluence of inexpensive, accessible consumer technology, and microblogging sites like Twitter and Facebook, has lowered the barriers of entry so far to make me think we're witnessing the birth of a completely new -- and arguably better -- breaking news system that involves everyone.

Just look at the experience of Lauren, my 6-year-old daughter, with her $68 Fisher-Price digital camera. On Tuesday, it vaulted us both into the local media spotlight within minutes after she captured footage of a funnel cloud forming over our house.

I uploaded everything to Flickr and Vimeo and posted links in Twitter. Minutes later, @CBS4Denver, the local CBS News affiliate, was broadcasting the footage on the air and interviewing me live over the phone.

That night, CBS came to our house to do a segment about my daughter and how she shot the photo on her Fisher-Price camera. Here's that segment, followed by my video footage.

What's most interesting to me is how naturally all of this happened, and how quickly a couple of tweets were picked up and broadcast all over the state. And it wasn't just by CBS -- The Denver Post, Daily Camera and Colorado Daily also pointed to it from their websites.

How It All Happened

Rewind to last Sunday, when five tornadoes went through the Denver area, with one overturning a car and injuring a man taking pictures. Since then, everyone here has been on edge whenever strange clouds form. That day, I bookmarked a local Twitter search for the term Tornado and began monitoring it whenever I heard reports of strange weather.

When my daughter came into my home office on Tuesday saying there was a scary looking cloud outside, I checked the NOAA radar for Denver and didn't see anything. I checked Twitter search and saw nothing as well. So we marched upstairs to take a look ourselves.

And that's when we saw a strange, sideways, shoelace-like cloud that appeared to be growing:

I immediately grabbed my camera and starting taking pictures. It was at this time that I remember hearing Lauren say, "I'm gonna get my camera too!" It was ultimately her photo above that ended up on TV news, also spreading through Twitter via a few retweets that resulted in 400 clicks in just a few hours (according to bit.ly).

Here are the most popular Tweets that started the ball rolling:

I should add that I also addressed some tweets to the attention of @cbs4denver, which made it easier for them to find, as well as @denverpost. I subscribe to both of their feeds and had noticed them asking people to tweet tornado news on Sunday. This was an incredibly smart move by both organizations, as it immediately extended their newsroom to include everyone on the ground. The Denver Post, followed by the Daily Camera and Colorado Daily, ended up embedding my video on their home pages. Vimeo reports that the video has been played 729 times since then, with 400 views on the first day.

How Breaking News Has Changed

This personal experience has really changed my view of breaking news, and opened my eyes to the revolution in news reporting that microblogging and real-time search are making possible. A year ago, I was skeptical of Twitter, thinking it was just another Web 2.0 darling that would quickly lose its luster. Now I'm starting to sense that Twitter, microblogging and real-time search are a new medium in their own right, distinct from being simply part of "the Internet." They're a new chapter in the digital media revolution.

This anecdote also shows how quickly breaking news spreads through Twitter, which, as a medium, is scooping not only local news organizations but also the National Weather Service, which did not declare a tornado warning in Broomfield until 30 minutes after we saw a funnel cloud forming.

This was even more obvious when the CBS 4 news crew arrived, fresh from chasing the storm all the way to Greeley, Colo., and still getting no direct tornado footage. Instead, they spent the afternoon visiting people who had already taken and broadcast their own footage online. There was once a time when a news station provided the main lens on a locality and thus the eye of common experience. Now, the news station's role is shifting to be more of a spotlight on "everycam." As Clay Shirky said in his book by the same name, here comes everybody!

After working countless weekends and days and nights, we are very happy to announce that Gram Vaani's platform for community radio stations is now available for download. We call it GRINS, standing for the Gramin Radio Inter Networking System.

GRINS is an enhanced automation system for community radio stations. Built on Gram Vaani's MINP platform, the current release of GRINS allows radio station operators to schedule broadcasts, preview programs, record live transmissions, and maintain an extensive semantically searchable library. In future releases, GRINS will be enhanced to handle telephony calls, sending and receiving SMS messages, and Internet connectivity to share and stream content with other GRINS deployments. Some of the key features of GRINS that distinguish it from other radio broadcast platforms are as follows:

• Commodity hardware: GRINS does most processing in software to eliminate the need of buying expensive audio hardware, and yet imposes very low processing overhead on the system. For this reason, GRINS can be run off commodity PCs and single board computers, significantly reducing the costs of setting up community radio stations.

• Service oriented design: All functionality provided by GRINS is handled by different services, such as the Audio Service for playout, Archiver Service for recording, Library Service for storage, etc. Each of these services can be run either on a single machine, or off
  multiple machines. This makes the deployment of GRINS extremely flexible to be able to fit into any kind of a radio station setup.

• Application development platform: The open API of GRINS allows third party developers to build their own radio applications using the various underlying services that GRINS provides. For example, you can build specific applications for the broadcast of educational programs
  or health programs, that allow quick search and playback features for the respective topics. In the future, once GRINS begins to support the telephone, video, and Internet planes, these applications can even be multiplanar in nature.

• Easy to use UI: The GRINS user interface has been especially designed keeping in mind the target population of rural areas in India and other developing countries. The use of large icons and simple navigation makes GRINS easy to use even for radio operators who are new to computerized systems.

• Diagnostics: A key feature of GRINS, the system can actually detect any network faults or audio cable errors or poor audio quality through DSP, and guide the operators on how to fix the problem locally. This reduces the down-time of the system so that radio stations located in remote rural areas do not have to wait for a technician to visit them and fix small problems.

Please navigate the following links to know more about GRINS:

• Screenshots, and download/installation instructions
• Configuration wizard to understand how GRINS can be plugged into your existing radio station setup

In just a few weeks, we will do out first pilot with Radio Bundelkhand, the community radio station in Orcha, India set up by Development Alternatives. And we will also demo GRINS during the upcoming C4FCM conference at MIT.

It has honestly been a tremendous effort. Building such a comprehensive system in 5 months, with over 50,000 lines of code is no joke! We are very fortunate to have such a gifted technology team at Gram Vaani.

And do visit the Gram Vaani website to stay updated on our progress.

In those days, there was a clear push to ensure that the most powerful medium in social communication would not be entirely dominated by commercial interests. It was common to assume media organizations had a responsibility to serve the public interest. That assumption was institutionalized with government regulations and franchise agreements with steep public service requirements. In the years since, however, there has been a shift to reducing those "burdens" on corporate media, and a move towards bringing a more free market-driven approach into our media system.

Corporate Media exists for profit

Somehow today, the assumption remains that corporate media institutions have some responsibility to serve more than their shareholders, and that assumption does more damage than it does good . Like any corporation, media corporations are designed to make money. Simply put, they sell eyeballs to advertisers, and their institutions are not designed to provide a public service. They are designed to maximize profits and none of us should fault them for doing that job as best they can. If we truly want a media system that provides for the public good, we need to recognize corporate media for what it is and start looking at alternatives.

If we want to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to be engaged in the dominant social conversation that reflects and shapes our collective values and awareness, the market will not provide for that. Unfortunately, while a pure market approach does not work, it's also true that traditional government support has failed as well. Across the PBS and Public Access TV sphere, the funding structure includes no incentives to innovate or excel. As opportunities in new media arose over the past decade, publicly-funded institutions had no incentive to pursue those opportunities and most have fallen behind.

In California, the recent Digital Infrastructure & Video Competition Act (DIVCA) has reduced the public interest "burden" on corporate media, and the fallout is the closure of over a dozen public access TV stations; most recently AccesSF. Their situation is similar to the one we faced in Denver, when the city removed operational support, and our station, Denver Community Television, was shut down by the City Council. In both cases, the cable providers contribute funds for capital equipment needs, but the organization must develop a model to sustain operations on their own.

Alternative models

As was the case in Denver, survival under DIVCA will require a new financial model for California stations. The upheaval they are facing can serve as the perfect opportunity for a funding evolution for public-interest media. The suggestion that all Public Media institutions operate as nonprofits is a good start, but these institutions can no longer depend 100% on government funds, franchise, or PEG fees for their operations. Like other media institutions, we have to explore some of the emerging financial models that can sustain media organizations today.

* Grants & Donations: There are several examples of news outlets funded primarily through private grants and individual donations. For example, ProPublica's 28 journalists produce stories and give them away for publication to other media outlets, including newspapers and web sites, funded primarily through a $10million annual donation from a private couple.

* Earned-Income Nonprofit Model: Several 501©(3) organizations generate the majority of their budget from earned-income. For example, over half of Denver Open Media's budget comes from earned-income web development and video production services provided to government and nonprofit clients from their CivicPixel (web) and Deproduction (video) departments.

* Subscription-Based: Some nonprofit websites and publications use a traditional subscription model. From websites to magazines, nonprofit media organizations like Adbusters derive a large percentage of their budget through subscriptions.

* Audience supported: Like public radio, this model depends on a membership model where the audience is asked to opt-in to financially support the content. Free Speech TV saw its budget increase nearly 25% when it developed a strong pledge-drive program in the late 90's.

* Crowd Funding: Similar to audience-supported media, some media sites ask for donations from readers for the content they want to see up-front. Spot.us is one of the best examples, where journalists pitch stories and members donate to fund the specific content they want to see.

* Volunteer: While most nonprofit media organizations use volunteers to some extent, few realize the true potential that exists in "powering the edges" and exploring a truly distributed workforce. Wikipedia is an obvious example, and nearly all of the Independent media centers across the global Indymedia.org network operate with a pure volunteer model. Furthermore, there are numerous examples of Pro-Am media organizations using professional staffers to filter, edit, and fact-check user-generated content provided by their community.

In public access TV, some of these more self-sufficient funding models have been criticized for letting cable providers or municipal and state governments off the hook for their duty in supporting free speech. But, this need not be an either/or proposition anymore. Developing a diverse funding model can be a strong tool in lobbying for increased government support, and can help ensure that those organizations which do receive public dollars have an incentive to innovate and progress.

The U.S. government spends less than $450 million annually subsidizing public media. Other democracies outspend the United States by huge margins per capita: Canada 16 times more; Germany 20 times more; Japan 43 times more; Britain 60 times more; Finland and Denmark 75 times more. Even as we work to become more self-sufficient, we need to be raising awareness that a truly democratic media system requires more public support. When new communities are engaged in the collective conversation that happens in the media, that is the first step in engaging and participating on a whole new level in society.

VV gives writing exercises to community producers to help them develop their ability to think through an argument. I am sharing below two recent pieces of writing by community producers. These were written by a Community Video Unit in rural Gujarat. This is an all-Dalit (a.k.a. "Untouchable") team. Neeru, who wrote the first story, is the youngest of 11 girls from a very poor family. Even though being Dalit, female and the last in your family is as unlucky a fate as you can have in India, the girl is a firecracker. The second story is written by Jitu, who used to work polishing diamonds in a small factory.

The two stories are on impacts of the community video unit - what changed in a village after a video was screened. Both Producers would be thrilled if someone on the "world wide web" posted them a question. If you want to start a small dialog with these rural journalists and changemakers, write it as a comment and I'll get on the phone and ask their response, and post their response.

Impact story by Neeru Rathod, about a film on domestic violence, translated from Gujarati:

Hi friends. I am Neeru Rathod. I will tell you about the impacts, solutions offered, changes in people and the actions taken by communities that the film about violence against women has initiated.

We screened the film in 39 villages. This film was screened in Bhalgamda village on the 17th of October 2008 by Kanchan, community video producer and Girishbhai, distributor. Around 100 people attended the screening of the film in this village.

There were 17 women who attended the screening and out of these 17, one woman, Kashiben Kalubhai Makwana got up and spoke on the microphone and put her thoughts across to the community. No woman in Bhalgmada village was ready to speak about domestic violence on the mic until Kashiben, who is 60 year old, got up and spoke in public for the first time in her life. She said, 'If there is any violence against women in our village then we must from now on take action against it, file a police case and help and support that woman. This (violence) is a question for all our sisters and daughters. Harrassment, mental torture, rape, all these acts will not be accepted.' She left this message for all the community members.

After the screening, we collected opinions and reactions of the people and they said that for the first time in their village a woman has come up and spoken in public like this on a mic. She had taken a lead on this issue in her village.

This is just one story from a village, where the screening of this film led to empowerment. After watching this video, 3 women have filed a complaint against such violence and have sought legal help from Navsarjan, the NGO I work with, which gave them phone numbers to call on and promised to provide legal help.

This way all our films lead to some action taken by people and awareness on social issues and with the same hope we are making our next video on primary education to initiate more change.

Impact story by Jitu Makwana of a film on toilets and sanitation.

Our video stopped water pollution and improved people's health!!

Friends, we have seen that we have a lot of issues around us. Dirty surroundings, polluted water, and badly built toilets are some of them. Our Community Video Unit made a film on the issue of toilets. We showed this film in many different villages including in Choraniya village on 29/08/08 in a night screening.

After watching this film, for the first time, the villagers in Choraniya village talked about the problems of their village. We had done a story in the film about Hotel Bhagyodaya, which is on the highway near the village. This hotel used to empty its toilet waste and dirty water directly into the village pond in Choraniya village, which was the only source of drinking water in the village. Obviously, many many people were falling sick after drinking the water from this filthy pond. But people were not able to protest against the owner of the Hotel because he was very influential and an "upper" caste and they were afraid he would attack them if they protested.

At the screening, the villagers asked us producers to help them in their struggle to make their drinking water safe again. We decided we would help, and so we worked with the villagers over the next month to establish a Women's Council in the village. This Women's Council would be able to take up this water issue, but also other issues in the future.

The Women's Council and the CVU team took out a rally together protesting against the disposal of the dirty water in the village pond. They gave application letters to the Taluka Officer [local district official]. They also filed a case against the Hotel owner.

And we won the case! This way, unity and humanity had a big win! The community people were also able to get rid of their fear of the Hotel owner because of this. The Hotel owner dismantled the earlier toilet from which the dirty water used to enter the pond, and built a new flush toilet. The dirty water stopped flowing into the pond and this also solved the issue of health in the village.