Whether this is about a "growing dependence on the state to provide everything" or just people getting on with their lives -- getting involved takes a lot of time -- is not clear.

Bowling Alone

What has caused this South African equivalent of "bowling alone"? In Robert Putnam's 2000 book, "Bowling Alone: the Collapse and Revival of American Community," the author rails against the how social capital in the U.S., which he describes as "the very fabric of our connections with each other," has plummeted in just one generation.

Putnam came to his conclusions about declining levels of social capital from studies of membership of organizations of all kinds, interest in politics (even the signing of petitions has fallen, his study found) and, surprisingly, the amount of time spent with family and friends. Putnam's bogeymen in terms of this mass disengagement of the social are urban sprawl, television, and the rise of the Internet.

Is it the same in South Africa? Why are studies and scenario exercises picking up on a decline in civic activism, participation in clubs, trade unions, political parties and so on?

To trying to figure this out, and do something about it, at least in one small town. That's part of the Iindaba Ziyafika (isiXhosa for "the news is coming") project, run out of the School for Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. The core proposition of Iindaba Ziyafika is that information and communication technology can enlarge the public sphere by providing the tools that encourage participation and facilitate that participation.

News by SMS

To achieve this, step one has to been to build a content management system, known as Nika, which allows people to send in news and information about what is happening in their communities through SMS. This information is published on the website and in the newspaper of Grocott's Mail, South Africa's oldest independent newspaper. (Grocott's recently relaunched their website, built to receive content from Nika. The site is served from Grocott's office, off a module called THATHA, which is a set of tightly integrated Drupal-based templates for publishing to the web).

Nika (isiXhosa for "to give") is proving its worth. Built on Drupal, it allows any community newspaper to receive SMS messages directly into the newspaper's workflow. By translating SMS messages through a special modem and some clever coding, the messages appear as text in the editor's inbox. Story tips or even full stories can be sent by ordinary people, who do not have access to email or the internet.

The system has been tested at Grocott's Mail for almost year, and is currently being tested at three other community newspapers. It will be available with some installation guidance and operating manuals to any community newspaper who wants to try it out by September 2009. (Watch this space for details of downloads.)

Nika's ability to receive messages from citizens directly into a newspaper's news feed gives ordinary people a voice they might not have had. For example, when teachers at a Grahamstown school went on strike and threatened the life of the school principal, a learner at that school sent Grocott's a message, alerting them to this crisis. Grocott's was able to send a reporter to investigate more deeply, bringing a dire situation to public notice.

Having got the technology in place, the next step is to link the issues to a sense of what can be done and citizen involvement.

GOING BEYOND TECHNOLOGY -- INSPIRING ACTION

For Iindaba Ziyafika, this raises a raft of questions about the limits of "conventional" journalism, the nature of developmental journalism (or journalism for development) and, indeed, about the very paradigms in which journalism is practiced. What is becoming clear is that South African media have to find ways to go beyond just raising the issues, towards framing issues and challenging people to make choices.

Part of the answer to increased participation may lie in more vigorous journalism that is committed to exposing and explaining issues in ways that make more sense to ordinary people and which invite reaction and participation.

What are the main issues in local government? What decisions have to made and when? Where can people participate and what choices are there? Can we enlarge the set of options we need to choose from?

If local media is not going help answer these questions, who will do it? Political parties and organs of participation -- such as ratepayers associations and community crime forums -- don't generally do a good job of this, for various reasons. Indeed, they very often rely on the media to help them make sense of the issues.

A good example of this was a report in Grocott's Mail that the municipality had decided to spend R800,000 on new traffic lights at a critical road junction. This sparked debate in the newspaper's letters page, with some contributions coming through the Nika-based SMS line, about alternative plans the council may not have considered, including the creation of a pedestrian-only area in the center of town.

Grocott's Mail provided a venue and facilitated a live discussion among citizens that examined various proposals. It ran stories about a previous (disastrous) attempt to do the same thing years ago, something the council did not seem aware of.

Underlying much of this is a clash between generally poor pedestrians and their needs and wealthier car-drivers. This seemingly simple issue raised issues around creating a common interest as well as a solution that would be to the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

But despite its new level of involvement, the newspaper's coverage highlighted what is generally lacking in civic news in South Africa: the news was about a decision already made. In addition to being about a fait accompli, the news itself was presented neutrally: It was left entirely up to citizens to write in with the new idea of the pedestrian mall.

How can we think about this differently in the future? The paper and the website could have, for example, run a poll on people's views, or framed alternative choices. In an area where unemployment is above the 50% mark, surely the R800,000 could be put to better use creating jobs: having humans direct traffic is a venerable African tradition.

At a local level, there is a strong case that the job of newspapers and their websites should be to alert people in advance about choices to be made, to help frame issues and explain what is at stake. Or is that an abrogation of conventional journalism's neutral "we'll call it the way we see it, and nothing more" approach?

GETTING JOURNALISTS AND CITIZENS INVOLVED

My view is that without the media making initial sense of what is at issue, of where and when interventions could be made and what the possible choices are, the feared decline in popular participation in decision-making is more likely to come true.

To make a difference, Grocott's, particularly in its most recent online reincarnation, is going to work much more actively to identify upcoming issues of importance to citizens and create forums, through cell phones, that alert people not just to issues, but also to their options in terms of those issues. Otherwise, we run the risk of being disempowering, rather than inspiring.

Doing these kinds of things will require a great effort by journalists and citizen journalists to interpret and explain issues. And there will be a related greater effort to reflect on opinions and even gather those opinions using cell phone-based technology.

To this end, Grocott's will look at ways of alerting citizens to critical issues well in advance of decisions about them. Online, we'll run more polls and SMS voting lines. As importantly, will work out new ways to ensure that decision-makers know what the results are of all these efforts. Hopefully they'll pay heed to what their constituents' views are (and if they don't, we'll let the public know that).

It will also be important to work more closely with other media channels, such as community radio, and it may even be necessary to create more spaces for meetings and maybe even step into the realm of calling meetings.

By doing all of this, Grocott's and Iindaba Ziyafika will continue to be a laboratory for the fusing of new technology and a fresh approach to framing issues and motivating public response and participation. We have to demonstrate better ways for the public to get involved in local democracy.

If successful, the model might be replicated all over South Africa and further afield, and be able to make a contribution to better governance in South Africa and Africa. It will allow us, to extend the bowling metaphor, to arrive at the bowling alleys together and to play the same game. But the first step is working out what that game is.

Once we've done that, we're on the path to talking to each other about solutions.

Even in the Iindaba Ziyafika project, our Knight funded expansion of the public sphere in Grahamstown City, we're focused on getting citizen journalism in via text (in particular in through SMS) and getting it back out via text. Text content for smartphones and mobile sites are huge and growing niches. But why not use voice more for citizen journalism, public debate, and just getting news teasers out?

There are already services that allow you to record a piece of audio and post it directly to the world, just as you would a video clip to YouTube. And although sites like Talkshoe and Utterli might not be the way -- certainly not from South Africa -- they might show the way. We want to build this kind of voice in/voice out technology into our Grocott's Mail online site.

Getting citizen journalism content is a real challenge here in South Africa, partly because of low levels of functional literacy, even among adults. For example, we find that with some school kids that we have trained they have great ideas and wonderful stories to tell, but struggle to write a coherent sentence! So getting user generated content content through voice and then sending it back as a piece of audio, or giving people access to a CHOICE of how they want to get their news (and their interactivity) -- text and/or audio -- may be well worth considering.

Issues of Cost and Moderation

But, of course, there are a variety of issues to consider. The biggest issue, as always, is cost. SMS is the number one cell phone based medium in Africa for a good reason: voice calls are expensive, both relative to SMS and in absolute terms.

But prices are dropping and voice is such a powerful medium that the extra cost might be worth it. Part of this power is that one does not need to be literate to record or listen to audio on a website as long as some elementary training is provided, and the steps are made easy enough. In addition, you can choose your language preference.

There is also the critical issue of moderation. Users send in an SMS story, and we can edit, add, check and then publish. If we allowed users to narrate a story directly, how could we be sure it was accurate, fair, and not defamatory?

Even simple things like restaurant reviews can be contentious. Just this week in our local newspaper, a fish shop owner was incensed by an SMS that the paper published, alleging his shop was dirty. Not only did the owner deny this, he suggested such allegations might be the work of rival shops trying to pinch his business, and, as such, the SMS might be libel!

To what extent does freedom of expression balance out with the right of people and businesses to not be unfairly bad-mouthed? This is something that would need to be worked out in practice (once some good legal advice is in place!)

Facilitating Inputs and Alerts

Clearly, we need to work out how we facilitate citizen journalist input. It could be a more powerful tool than we've ever thought. Talk radio, for example, is big in South Africa: to what extent does convergence mean that community newspaper cites could become similar to talk radio sites, featuring both interactive audio and broadcast audio?

What is exciting is the possibility of pushing audio to citizens who've signed up for something like a headline service or a specific kind of alert -- like "weather warnings" or "jam on highway" or "municipality about to pass a law" notices. Now, sure, you can send an SMS, IM, or email (for the smarter phones), but getting a voice message in your inbox still has more immediacy and own-language choice.

Arguably, a short spoken message, of, say, 30 seconds, can get a lot more across than a 160 character SMS. Voice can also convey emotion better, another way to aid meaning.

A community paper may not have the capacity for alerts, and there are a lot of technical issues to work out before something like "voice-box headlines" can be sent out in large numbers. In South Africa, callers do not pay to receive calls nor do they pay to retrieve voicemail from their voicemail boxes, so the entire exercise would be free to the user. But how would a voice headlines service be able to attract sponsorship? Could you tack on a voiced "brought to by" before or after (or both) to your audio headlines?

Equally important are the tech issues. One can send out 10,000 SMS messages or emails virtually simultaneously, but with voice, each voice box must be dialed, the pre-recorded message heard, and the message laid down.

We're thinking about what kind of dialer could do this and investigating the possible costs.

Of course, there are those who say voicemail is dead but they are talking about peer-to-peer voicemail, not professionally produced, user requested, sharp, snappy sets of headlines that really fill you in on what is happening around your town exactly when you want it (as opposed to waiting for radio news on the hour for example). Maybe that difference makes it appealing enough for people to sign up and dial in for.

Does anyone know of newspapers using pushed out headline audio on cell phones? Or ways of getting citizen journalism in through audio recordings? Plenty of papers will send you SMS headline menus that invite you to log into the newspaper website, but how many, if any, are sending out audio headlines that entice you to log on, or even to buy a paper copy? And are payment issues different: Do you have to pay to receive calls, or retrieve voice mail in your country?

We're hoping to conduct our first push audio headline experiments in July this year, so watch (or listen if we get it right) to this space for more.

And is the prospect of being more "in the know," and more connected and more involved in one's community, attractive enough to inspire people to take the time out to do citizen journalism?

The old adage that "all news is local" does hold a great deal of truth. News can be locally generated or outside news can be made local. The implications of any big news story - like H1N1 virus, a.k.a. swine flu - can almost always be localized to create stories about how this impacts on you, where you are right now.

You might want to know about local stocks of anti-virals, and you would certainly be interested if the hospital near you started treating cases. In fact you'd probably be unhappy not knowing.

But "big story localized" is not what we mean when we talk of hyper-local. We usually mean something that emanates out of a defined geography. Benedict Anderson theorized the idea of "imagined communities" in the 1980s, providing us with a powerful way of understanding nationalism and group identity. We live in collectives like nation states that are so big that we can't know everyone face-to-face, and we have to build a collectively imagined (but often contested) set of ideas of what such a community looks like, what it stands for, and what value we place on belonging to it.

But in small geographic areas, like a school, or a city block, we don't have to imagine our community as much. Or do we? We live right in it, even if we don't know everyone in it. It is much more face-to-face, and in many ways, there is less need for it to be imagined.

Hyper-local coverage is about locality, build around a boxed-in closeness and a physical terrain. We are interested in knowing more about what is going here because it is literally where we are at -- so the thinking goes.

How the Local Paper Fits In

But there is also an argument to be made that we are interested local news because it allows us to imagine relationship with our space, and other people in it. We've seen just this week, with the 140th anniversary of the local community newspaper, Grocott's Mail (an essential component of our Knight News Challenge Iindaba Ziyafika project), just how central a local paper's reporting is to how people think about themselves. It is about how to make sense of geographically-based location in relation to other people living there.

With South Africa's history of division, and of rigid apartheid of geographical space, building a new sense of community-hood and nation-hood is clearly a very important social task. Contributing to this is a big part of our overarching objectives.

In Grahamstown, South Africa, we have a perfect laboratory to test what works and doesn't work in hyper-local media and journalism. But there are dangers when areas of greatest likely interest to those who live here -- say a few square kilometers around where people live or work, or your school or campus dorm -- still largely reflect the segregation of apartheid-era social planning.

Might hyper-local in this context not simply reinforce ethnic and class ghettos, only slightly less strongly formed now, even though all legal compulsions have been removed?

This week, we're starting our training for what will eventually be a dozen local school "cell phone media clubs." Young volunteers with an interest in making a difference in their communities through learning to use and make media will learn about digging up and reporting interesting stories, both in their schools and in their communities. Building on the work of the 2008 class, we'll be focusing on getting the news in to a central point -- Grocott's website and even into the Grocott's print edition -- primarily via SMS.

But in 2009, we're channeling a lot of energy into creating something like a school newsletter as a basic building block for getting into the swing of hyper-local journalism. In South Africa, better-off schools have weekly newsletters. They are mostly filled with sports news, but also carry some cultural and club activity, and sometimes news of a new teacher arriving, or an old one leaving, for example.

Poorer schools often don't have these kind media channels, and that might be why in many poorer schools there seems to be a greater sense of distance between parents and the schools their children attend.

Might being able to read about what is happening at the school make parents feel more involved, or maybe want to be more involved? Do they play a role in helping people connected to the school -- parents, teachers, learners, families, communities -- imagine a particular role and relationship to that school. And, if they do (we think they do), how can they help everyone take a great stand for improving educational and life experiences in these schools?

Basic Training

Getting practical, cell phone media club members are going to get some fun basic training and then they going to choose news beats. Someone is going to be responsible for reporting on the debate club, or the chess club, or the football team. There will also be social news, "what's on," and opinion pieces. They're all going to write short stories and take photos on their cell phones.

These highly local school-based news will then be edited professionally, and appear on Grocott's Mail Online and sometimes in Grocott's print edition. Our first examples should be up and running in June.

We are also finding ways of getting this news and information back to schools that often don't have much access to the Internet (and, indeed, few computers for any purpose). We are going to use SMS, Mxit and Facebook to do this, once we've built that capacity, and figured out ways to pay for it, but we're also going to make print-outs on big A3 sheets and paste them up in a specially designated "news wall" at each school.

Combination of old and new media channels, but suited for purpose.

We're taking this approach even though some voices within and outside our project are asking: "is this journalism or just information provision?" Is allowing schools to report on their sports results, on a public website, really journalism?

Our view is that getting learners reporting about things that are important to them will generate, on its own, a whole range of topics we've not even thought about, some of which might have greater social import then say, a soccer score.

But starting with sports scores (and match reports) or news of the School's choir's performance at the regional choir competitions, for example, and with other very (hyper) local news, is a great way to build audience rapport and reporting skills. In any case, who's to judge what social import is, if not the communities and schools themselves?

Over time, we'll add instant messaging, twitter and Facebook feeds, so that these spaces can be updated consistently. We're also looking at providing public information, where available -- like a school's graduation rates -- on the site.

Contentious Issues at Schools

Watch this space: Schools in South Africa are sensitive places and we're faced with a huge range of interesting issues that arise simply from having a space to report about what's happening, not matter how banal that might appear to some in the first place. Just posting graduation rates can cause controversy for example; many schools are not proud of their achievements and with good reason.

And other issues can be equally contentious: for example, recently, some pupils (or learners as we like to call them in South Africa) expressed some critical views about the dominance of rugby football at local high schools (because the rugby authorities make money available to promote the sport at grassroots level), as opposed to ordinary football (soccer) which is hugely popular in South Africa.

Some of the school teachers were very upset to be criticized in this way. How will we handle this kind of issue? How do we support our learner citizen journalists to do their jobs, but also how do we stay out of it, and just let it happen?

Schools are in fact, hugely contested places. In the current set of newsletters that we are looking at -- from wealthier schools in Grahamstown -- you see all sorts of power relationships leaking out. Boys' sport is often given more prominence compared to girls' sport, for example. What's that all about? How do we make sure we don't inadvertently reinforce a whole bunch of gender stereotypes, to cite just one area of obvious contestation?

We are clearly going to have very interesting issues come up simply by creating the space, and providing some skills and resources, for school-based hyper-local reporting.

But does the input method matter when it comes to encouraging cell phone journalism, and particularly journalism for a 'formal' publication, like a community newspaper?

Does slow bandwidth dampen amateur reporters' enthusiasm, and if cell phones are going to become significant input devices, what input medium -- short message service (SMS), multimedia short message, instant messaging or social networking generated messages -- is best suited to citizen journalism?

There are of course big differences in costs and carrying capacity of the different mediums on a cell phone. SMS is especially expensive, working out at about 11 US cents per message, as a world average. Some countries have an average charge that is above this, obviously, and some are very dramatically below it. In South Africa, the cost of an SMS approaches about 7 US cents.

South Africa has the biggest gap between rich and poor (as measured by income) in the world. So while many people use SMS extensively, for the half of the population that earn less then R600 per month (less than US $2 per day), 75 cents is seriously expensive. At current pricing levels, just sending 1 SMS a day would consume something like 4% of the income of this portion of the population, never mind the additional costs of making the occasional phone call!

But SMS is very useful and is more widely used than household economics in many country might predict, including in South Africa. Worldwide, SMS use generated about US $100 billion of income for network providers in 2008, and with profit margins a stratospheric 90%, there seems to be a lot room for price reductions -- or for finding alternative ways of communicating text and photos on cell phones. (See ITU figures.)

This is part of the reason why Mxit, an instant messaging/chat room type application is so popular in South Africa, and elsewhere on the continent. Any instant messaging system, or email-based medium uses data connections and not voice/SMS transmission routes. Costs are a tiny fraction, per message, of the cost of SMS.

That's also why, in Grahamstown, as part of the Iindaba Ziyafika citizen journalism project, in addition to using SMS to send and receive citizen-generated news/photos and information, we are also exploring the use of social networking sites, including Mxit and Facebook, to get stories and photos to the local community newspaper, Grocott's Mail, and Grocott's Mail online.

This month we've started to explore using Facebook in particular, as an easy means for 'friends' of the New Media Editor (a post we've just filled and who will be starting work on June 1st) - to send in short stories, or longer stories via the Facebook mailbox function, and even instant messages (when the editor is online) from cell phones.

The Facebook Option

Photos are also easy to upload to Facebook on a computer, although a bit more tricky to do directly from cell phones, although a variety of third party applications address this. We're looking at what works best and we'll adapt these applications to our African conditions if needs be.

We're also exploring ways of integrating the citizen journalists' input directly into the editors' 'in-box' in the open-source community newspaper content management system NIKA, that we've built for Grocott's Mail (and which we'll be releasing to the world, free, later this year). Until we get that translation from phone to CMS right (which we've already done with SMS), we'll use manual copy and paste.

Again, photos present a particular side project to get right.

We are getting clearer that it is important to offer potential and actual citizen journalists a variety of input mediums, including walk-in opportunities. For hyper-local journalism to take off in resource poor areas like Grahamstown, people need to be able to post easily and cheaply, and choice is going to be critical. SMS has the advantage of great ease of use, but Facebook on cell phones is not rocket science, as millions are proving daily.

To ensure we focus on closing the citizen journalist loop, we're also exploring getting the news OUT via social networking sites like Facebook. Friends of the Editor, for example, would obviously also be able to receive news and URL links back from the editor: again the question is how to automate these transmissions.

We are also trying to work out how you could send such messages to individual in-boxes, say in Facebook, and then have Facebook automatically alert you by email to your cell phone.

We're looking at things such as how many people have cell phones that can make a noise or vibrate when you get an email as opposed to an SMS, and how many makes of phone can be programmed so that you are alerted only when you get emails from a particular source?

As we find out just how popular social network sites are, and how many people use them mainly or exclusively from their cell phones, we're starting to get excited about developing this new chapter of cheaper supplements to what has, up to now, been our singular focus on SMS.

But what if your publication is not as famous as these giant attractors of User Generated Content? Or if the news sent in by citizen journalists is only going to be published on-line in a small town web site? Is the 'kick' still there?

And, some related questions: even when a user generates great content and has a great experience doing so, or even when a citizen generates a good bit of journalism, why is the drop off rate so high? Even serious blogging sites see high attrition rates, with only a small group of hard-core bloggers blogging with reasonable regularity (and who knows what that is?!).

This is something we're giving a lot of thought and energy to as part of the_ Iindaba Ziyafika_ project in Grahamstown, South Africa. We building platforms for user generated content and citizen journalism, and we're proving training to hundreds of school children on how to use the old/new technology of sms to contribute their issues, views, news, info, tips, photos.

But how much uptake will there be, even after the 2009 training? What will keep users coming back to contribute more, and how, in resource deprived communities, do you remove financial disincentives - the costs of sms and using data - from getting in the way of an enlarged public sphere?

We're coming up with two sets of solutions - one educative, aimed at 'preparing the ground' for greater civic participation through the media, and the other compensatory and incentivising. Both are presenting interesting dilemmas. Here is one of the core issues to do with 'preparing the ground': in my next blog, I'll share some of our problems and solutions to the issues of reducing financial disincentives and creating a series of positive inducements for citizen journalism.

It seems to us that the core question, in terms of 'social context' or public 'receptivity' is how do you get young people interested in journalism, generating content, finding their voices, getting their voices heard? And there is a prior question to get clear about too: is there an innate interest that just needs to be drawn out, or do you have to create that interest and nature it?

We're pretty sure from our initial work in 2008, that only a portion of learners at local schools are interested in participating in journalism, making media, and making a noise! We also are clear that only a smaller subset of this interested group is going to be enthusiastic about it, and reasonably competent at doing it.

To galvanise this group, we're creating "cell phone media clubs" at all high schools in Grahamstown, starting with four low-resource schools, and eventually expanding to include even high-resource private schools. These media clubs will be open to all learners in South Africa's Grades 10 and 11 strata (the 3rd and 2nd last year of high school respectively), but we've decided to do membership selection based on a questionnaire and a short essay.

These clubs, launching in April, will do cool things, including outings to local and regional media outlets - converging newsrooms, radio and TV studios, web content generators -- and a lot of training and educating in areas like the context of media in SA, learning about what media does in society, how do you write a news story and what is the difference between news and opinion. And there will be in plenty of debate and upskilling around doing cell-phone journalism and generating content for media.

We've already announced and advertised these clubs at 4 local schools, and entries are flooding in; people want to join and although we are not yet100% sure it this is just because of the proposed outings and possibility of club caps and t-shirts (which have not been mentioned to prospective members yet, but the word seems to be out there!) or because of a real interest in what the club will be doing, and enabling members to do.

The proof will lie in how the clubs are run, how much the learners get involved, and what material they produce.

In a perfect world, everyone votes, and everyone blogs or expresses themselves in some way, and everyone does their bit to hold politicians and officials to account. In our world, it is a lot more than half the battle to allow people to discover that their voice is important, their vote is precious, and we'll never get the kind of services we deserve unless we hold both public and private service providers to account, through the media and through the ballot box.

With our core group of learners, selected for their curiosity, interest in technology, and sense of civic duty, we think we can create a vibe in Grahamstown's schools that will make citizen journalism -- and generating content that enlarges the public sphere and draws people into debate -- into a plausible activity and something to do regularly. We don't only want those members of our clubs to be making a noise: we want them to be the catalyst for everyone in their schools to give it a go.

I'll blog regularly about how our cell phone clubs are going. In the meantime, we're still thinking hard about what incentives will work best - cash, airtime, prizes, certificates, or nothing-at-all - to start generating loads of citizen journalism once our clubs are going. Any thoughts welcome!

What does it mean to empower people to participate in projects and politics that might improve their own lives?

How do you seed participation in a way that promotes sustainability after the initial impetus?

15 years after the first democratic elections in South Africa, following decades of political mobilization by anti-apartheid movements and organisations, these questions are still burning brightly in South Africa.

Since 1994 'belonging to something' has fallen off significantly in South Africa. Religious affiliations, belonging to a sports clubs, even union membership is down, often sharply. Many lament the apparent lack of involvement and 'apathy' among the youth, particularly the 'born-frees -- young people who came of age in a democratic South Africa.

Indeed, some blame the very ANC-led government that benefited from high levels of popular organisation in the past, for encouraging a sense that 'government will provide', and fostering a sense of 'entitlement'.

One important facilitator of participation is of course media -- and local media in particular. When organisations spring up, they need a means of attracting interest and support, and getting their message out. Diverse media, offering a multitude of platforms, is an important part of participation in local and national politics.

Media encourage debates, raises awareness and provide a spur to participation. Or does it? And how does it do that, in resource poor environments? And can a new kind of media, based on cell phone sending and receiving, make a difference?

This is some of the background to the contextual dilemmas of the Iindaba Ziyafika ("The news is coming") project getting of the ground in our small town, Grahamstown, in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. (Guy Berger, who led the team that won the Knight Foundation Challenge Grant, has blogged extensively about this project elsewhere on this site).

The Iindaba Ziyafikaproject has multiple aims including:

• To foster both 'citizen journalism' and greater access to news and information by creating open-source software that allows two-way communication between the town's newspaper, Grocott's Mail (the oldest independent newspaper in South Africa) and the community, mostly through cell phone-based systems;

• Opening a citizen's newsroom, to help all community members participate in creating and receiving news and information.

• Teach young people the poorer parts of Grahamstown (and eventually all school goers) how to use their cell phones to be part of the news making process.

But in addition to these specific aims, the project also aims to shift levels of participation in both news creation AND in enhancing and uplifting the lives of people in Grahamstown, one of the poorest areas in South Africa.

Specifically, in addition to trying to create "a new kind of local newspaper, one using new technology to communicate across social fault lines of language, race, class and age," the project sets out to: "produce a more vigorous local dialogue, a community truly in conversation with itself".

Moreover, and "ultimately" the project is hoping to contributing, in however small a way to: "a more representative, shared and participatory 'public space' that will result in better, more democratic decision making in the communities".

As I complete my first two months at the helm of this project, I've had to grapple with a number of inter-related dilemmas:

• First, what does the current 'local dialogue' look like? And particularly, how do young people, our project's main target audience, get involved or excluded from this dialogue?

• How do we measure the current level or quality or quantity of local dialogue, to be
sure that Iindaba Ziyafika plays some role, over the next three years, in making 'more vigorous'.

• How participatory and representative is local politics and the 'public space' right now?

• How might causing cell phones and newspapers to do "new things together" as the project has undertaken to do, and has started to do, contribute to causing 'better more democratic decision making come about".

I believe there is a great danger in projects such as Iindaba Ziyafika being implemented and measured purely at the level of the 'well constructed anecdote'. For example, we already know (from speaking with lots of people) that politics in Grahamstown is fairly elitist, although possibly not as much as the country as a whole. However, beyond its elite nature, political meetings are fairly well attended, but we are currently in the run-up to an national election in April: participation falls off dramatically in non-election years.

But who is participating?

What do we know about their class and gender status, their age, their agendas, and their motivations?

How does the politics of patronage play out locally and to what extent is local politics 'identity' driven as opposed to 'issues' driven (the distinction between two kinds of politics is in any case undercooked in my view: one's take on any given set of 'issues', and one's sense of identity are usually deeply interrelated).

And this is just in the political sphere. What about jobs and the economy, health and well being, educational issues, and crime and social justice?

In short, how do we get beyond the anecdote? How do we move beyond a story-based analysis of the 'current conjuncture' - where we are in terms of democracy, levels of participation, the role of the various medias - to something a little more solid (or a lot more solid if we can figure out how to do that)?

Without a more comprehensive empirical base, I've been worried that we'll only have a different set of anecdotes at the end of the project. While we obviously do hope to be able to tell different and better stories in three years time, we need to bed these stories in both a clearer analytical framework, and in empirical data that are as rigorous as possible.

To achieve this, we are exploring:

• Creating a deeper understanding of the current political culture in Grahamstown. While part of this will necessarily be anecdotal, it needs to develop a conceptual framework and some basic data that we can relook at each year that our project rolls out. We are exploring working with other university-based academic departments, such as Sociology, Political Science and Anthropology to collate as much information as we can about Grahamstown. Even basic demographic data is hard to come by! We might have a colloquium, and we should certainly create a paper or papers through we can capture and share insights about the social and political culture in Grahamstown.

• To create basic data sets, we are going to need to convene focus groups and supplement these with broader surveys. We want to establish some kind of baseline for current levels of political participation, including levels of knowledge of 'the issues', levels of participation in political, civic or social organisations, and a better understanding of what motivations those who are active and what inhibits those who are passive.

• Surveys and/or focus groups to better understand the current and future consumption of local and national media.

• Good data on current cell phone and internet penetration and, in particular, data on the extent to which the current population of Grahamstown is accessing any kind of news, information using the web and cell phones.

Doing all this won't be easy, and these are only an early set of ideas of how to establish some baselines. We also need to remind ourselves that our project has a youth focus, so we may confine some of our base-line creation just to young people in Grahamstown, or focus exclusively on the less resourced and less developed areas of town. It is tempting to try and get a 'bigger picture' but that might just not be possible.

Of course, there will be other measures, such as how many stories are being contributed by Grahamstown residents to the Grocott's Mail via cell phone,or how many people are accessing the website because of cell phone alerts. We need to figure out those baselines too, as well as proper ways of measuring the uptake of the new tools we disseminate.

By doing all this, we hope we will have some chance of knowing not only if the news has arrived, but whether its arrival has made any difference to the lives of people!