MediaShift Idea Lab

Beanstockd Class Field Trip to NC

Angela Antony — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:38:17 -0500

It's the start of the fall semester at UNC and Beanstockd has just taken a trip down to visit the class, present on Beanstockd, and answer all their questions.

Prior to our arrival, the 20 students in the class had already done their preliminary research on us. They were very engaged, asking insightful questions throughout the class, and after our presentation proceeded with a 45-minute Q&A session.

In December, at the end of the semester, we will go back for the most exciting part of this course: the final presentations! Each team of 5 will present to us their step-by-step strategy for reaching our stated objectives, and we will begin the process of integrating and implementing their great ideas into our project.

The Shocking Truth About Journalism, Activism, and the Healthcare Reform Debate

Ryan Sholin — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 10:40:08 -0500

A few weeks ago, I spotted a link to something called deathpanels.org getting passed around Twitter, and quickly traced its origin to Matt Thompson, Knight Foundation interim online community manager and general champion of contextual journalism. (Note: deathpanels.org is an independent project of Matt's, and not affiliated with the Knight Foundation.)

Remembering a conversation that I had with Matt and others at a recent conference, I realized the idea had been brewing for some time.

A few minutes after I looked at the site for the first time, I called up Matt to talk about the idea.

Listen to our conversation

The full transcript of our conversation

Ryan Sholin: This is Ryan Sholin and I'm here with Matt Thompson. Matt do you want to introduce yourself?

Matt Thompson: Sure, once again, Matt Thompson, I'm an online journalist, and the interim online community manager for the Knight Foundation.

RS: Cool, so I, within the last 10 minutes, saw a tweet about something called deathpanels.org, and it looked scary. But Matt and Howard Weaver were talking about it, and I know what both of them are interested in, so I clicked through and I was not disappointed. And I discovered, before I even got to the "about this site" link that explains that Matt was behind it, I fired up Terminal, did a quick whois, and I knew that it was Matt, but I could have just kept clicking and I would have found out. Matt, do you want to explain what deathpanels.org is and why you just put it up and what it's for?

MT: Sure, so deathpanels.org is an expose behind the disturbing details that underpin the current health reform process. And in truth, it's about the disturbing details of the U.S. healthcare system that make health reform necessary.

RS: So, when I open up this site, I get a big scary red thing with like a gothic tattoo sort of Death Panels and a skull behind it. This seems kind of sensational almost, like you're just trying to get me to click through to read the disturbing details.

MT: Right, well, it's targeted, when you come to the site, the whole kind of tongue-in-cheek goal is that you won't know that this is by someone who is very sympathetic to the cause of healthcare reform. But it is playing up the total, I mean the whole "death panels" element of it, the ludicrous "I will not have my grandmother paraded before a death panel" nature of the debate around healthcare right now. I want to play on that element of fear and panic and paranoia to get people to what I hope is actually a fairly sober and, well, friendly, accessible overview of the problems in the current system, what Congress is doing about them, and what are some other good resources to look at for finding our more information about health reform.

RS: So you mentioned more resources. As soon as I click on the disturbing details, and you kind of give it away in the URL because it's "/the-problem" so you're presenting an issue. And the first thing that I see is that there's a lot of links. Can you talk a little bit about why you did that and what that's for?

MT: Yes. Basically my whole goal in creating a site like this is to bring some context to the issue of healthcare reform.

It's difficult -- you'd be surprised that there are just not that many places on the Web that sum up the basic, "these are what the problems are," "these are what some of the proposals for fixing those problems"; that information, [is] sort of buried in a lot of different places around the Web. That said, there are a lot of places around the Web that are doing a great job of tackling tiny pieces of that larger question: what are the problems and how are we trying to fix them?

And so,when you come to this site, after you click on the disturbing details about health care reform, the first thing that you see is a page that sort of summarizes the three overarching basic problems of the U.S. healthcare system, with links to different sources. And these are sources that are in most cases as non-partisan as I can find -- think tanks, non-partisan institutions and what-have-you, that look at different aspects of the U.S. healthcare system and why it's so lame.

RS: And then the next page we get to is the proposals, right, this is how we're going to fix the problem, and it's flagged as "what Congress wants to do" about health care.

MT: Yes. This was a page, actually, when I started creating this Web site on Tuesday night [August 11, 2009], I thought that a lot of this, that I'd be able to find all this in a pretty digestible form, or maybe in a few different links, or I'd just be able to say, "here's the picture, go nuts." But I didn't find anything that sort of summed up the common proposals in a sort of human-accessible fashion. And so I ended up just doing that to the best of my ability: taking the main components of all the different pieces of health care legislation that are winding their way through Congress and summarizing them, with, again, supporting links to different sources, to the best sources that I could find, explaining what each proposal is, why it could help, and what some of the pros and cons might be.

RS: And you've got, especially, these three criteria: "Does it improve effectiveness, does it control cost, and does it increase access" and then some checkboxes below that. And it certainly makes it clear that there seems to be one choice out there that does all three of those things.

MT: Right, and this is sort of an info design thing that might be a little misleading in fact. These different proposals, even if one gets at all three goals of health reform -- improving effectiveness, bringing costs under control, bringing coverage to more Americans -- it may not even be the most important piece of the puzzle. Each of them is important, and each of those three aspects is important, and some of them that just focus on one aspect are as important as the others, but you'll notice that those three things, the three elements -- effectiveness, cost control, more access -- are the same things that I identify in the "problems" page as being the overarching problems with the system. It's ineffective, it's leaving America bankrupt, and it leaves many Americans out altogether.

RS: So in a lot of ways here, you're using the "Death Panels" meme, if you will, to kind of turn it around on the people that are saying a lot of things without any information, and you're providing the information to back up what you think is the right frame for the discussion that we should be having in the media.

MT: Right.

RS: People are going to ask, is it activism or is it journalism?

MT: Yeah, absolutely, and I come out, one of the first things I say on the About page, is I'm a journalist. I identify myself as an online journalist, but I definitely have a perspective on this, which is that I am in favor of health reform, broadly.

RS: And I'm right there with you. So from a theoretical point, I'm sort of interested in [the question]: Does identifying ourselves as journalists, first, does that make it easier for the average person who comes across this site to then say "Oh, OK. I believe what he says, he's got a point of view, but I can tell this is journalistic."

MT: Yeah, it's really hard to say. And this is an area, especially, health reform, where it's difficult to draw that line, partially because the balance of evidence is weighted so heavily in one direction. It is really difficult to say that the U.S. has a good healthcare system, or the best healthcare system, among industrialized nations and provide any evidence to back up that claim.

So, you will notice, the Frontline producer, T.R. Reid, who's behind one of the big media efforts to grapple with the problems of the healthcare system, which is called "Sick Around the World" -- it's a Frontline documentary. T.R. Reid is actually a strong proponent of health reform, and his new book looks at healthcare systems in other countries and comes away with the conclusion that the U.S. should emulate these. So in a way, T.R. Reid, who's definitely a prominent, well-recognized journalist on the issue, is also an activist for this particular type of reform.

It is a tricky line, and I think, especially on a subject like this, [that] saying a lot of things that have a lot of evidence behind them and that you can say are sort of objectively true still sounds like you're stumping for a particular perspective.

RS: Right and it's not necessarily as clear-cut as "the earth is round; the earth is flat," but I'd like to believe for a majority of Americans [that] it's clearly something right, and so as journalists, the question is how do we maintain our skepticism? I'm not going to use the O word but [how do we] maintain our skepticism and yet come up with the right evidence to back up our claims? And I think that you've done that here, and stylishly. So thank you for taking a quick time-out to talk to me. I'm sure that you're refreshing Google Analytics a couple times. Obviously, I think this is a really fascinating piece of journalism, and I hope we'll be able to talk more about it soon.

MT: Hey, thanks for the interview Ryan, and to everyone who's listening. Check out deathpanels.org and spread the word.

IOC to Include Citizen Contributions with Virtual Olympic Congress

Alexander Zolotarev — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 16:10:14 -0500

The Olympics is a special brand that boasts a bottomless marketing potential. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) admits that it has to be careful in positioning the Games' name online. Even so, it's clear that, because of its social nature and enormous global outreach, the Olympics have terrific potential to develop on the web. I decided to look at what the IOC is doing to promote the Games today.

In the early fall 2007, IOC announced the start of the Virtual Olympic Congress with an attractive tagline: "Taking the Pulse. Make your Move. Join the debate. Voice Your Opinion." Generally, the IOC convenes Olympic Congresses at irregular intervals to discuss various topics of concern to the Games; participants are usually limited to IOC representatives. This was the first time in the history of Olympic Congresses that ordinary people could voice their opinions on the subjects of discussion.

In promoting the Virtual Olympic Congress, the IOC also turned to social media marketing and created the 2009 Virtual Olympic Congress Facebook Page. The general public -- excluding employees of the IOC and the National Organizing Committees and the members of the Olympics Family -- were encouraged to submit papers and thoughts on the following suggested main themes, each one having subthemes.

Suggested Themes

Theme 1: The Athletes

1.1 Relationship between the athletes, the clubs, federations and the NOCs
1.2 Health protection in training and competition
1.3 The social and professional life of athletes during and after elite competition

Theme 2: Olympic Games

2.1 How to keep the Games as a premier event?
2.2 Olympic values
2.3 Universality and developing countries

Theme 3: The Structure of the Olympic Movement

3.1 The autonomy of the Olympic Movement
3.2 Good governance and ethics
3.3 The relationships between the Olympic Movement and its stakeholders

Theme 4: Olympism and Youth

4.1 Moving towards an active society
4.2 Is competitive sport still appealing?
4.3 Youth sport events

Theme 5: The Digital Revolution

5.1 A new management of sports rights
5.2 How to increase the size of the sports audience
5.3 Communication with stakeholders in the digital age

And this is how the IOC explains the project at its official website:

Taking the pulse of the Olympic Movement, analyzing its strengths and weaknesses, evaluating the opportunities and the risks it faces: these are the challenges which IOC President Jacques Rogge laid down by convening the next Olympic Congress, which will be held in Copenhagen in October 2009. Since the previous Congress, the Centennial Olympic Congress held in Paris in 1994, the world has changed. While the main concern at the previous Congress was to ensure the integration of all the constituents of the Olympic Movement, the challenge will be quite different in 2009. A guiding concept links all five themes chosen for this Olympic gathering: the role of the Olympic Movement in society and in all regions of the world.

To get a sense of what previous Olympic Congresses have discussed, here are the topics of past meetings (the information comes from the IOC website):

Varna 1973:

Rethinking the idea of amateurism was at the centre of discussion. The new eligibility rule for the Olympic Games authorized the financial and material assistance which had in the meantime become indispensable to elite level training, while only personal profit derived from a sports activity remained prohibited.

Baden-Baden 1981:

Unprecedented attention was devoted to the concerns of the athletes. For the first time, the athletes themselves played a leading role in a Congress. Their accounts rang with an authenticity that nobody dared contradict. The Congress in Baden-Baden thus paved the way for the creation of the IOC Athletes' Commission, which celebrated its 25th anniversary last year.

Paris 1994:

The Congress in Paris proved trend-setting in an area of great interest today: protection of the environment, with the environment declared to be an essential component of Olympism. A survey was conducted, and measures to optimize the Olympic Movement's contribution to preserving the environment were defined.

The Virtual Olympic Congress 2009

The Grand Jury, assembled by the IOC, has been analyzing the citizen contributions and out of over 1,000 submissions, 100 will be selected and used in the Congress proceedings and print materials.

I expect that this will be useful in determining the future of the Olympics. Depending on the outcome, we may see future experiments in democratizing the Games as the IOC adjusts the Olympic brand to a post-Internet world.

Help Us Rename the Daily Phoenix Light-Rail Publication

Adam Klawonn — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 19:01:34 -0500

It's been 42 days and counting since the Knight Foundation announced that Daily Phoenix, our hybrid platform to deliver news and information to urban audiences by light-rail stop, won startup funding. Back here in the scorching confines of Phoenix, the interest was immediate. Local TV station KTVK-TV Channel 3 interviewed us on their signature program, Good Morning Arizona.

It was an incredible opportunity and an enlightening experience that really helped us out. For those of you who are thinking about doing a new media project or are already working on one, the TV interview format can be a boon as it forces you to sum up your project in small sound bites (while under the extreme pressure of being on live television).

Apparently, we did a great job. How do I know this? Well, when we laid out the basics of the project (our pitch), the anchor, Tess Rafols, thought it made perfect sense and, in fact, was surprised no one had thought of it yet. (The Internet is a pretty big place, so trust us, Tess -- this idea is floating around elsewhere.) Still, we were very encouraged, and we think we are bringing a great concept to the table.

Now for the fun part: The interview also made us re-think our name, Daily Phoenix.

This has been a source of angst for us since the interview. Why? Well, the word "Daily" doesn't really add much utility to the name and isn't very descriptive. It's on the Web, so, of course, anything can be "daily." Originally, we thought it made sense because it gave people the sense that this is a publication -- which, indeed, is the exact reaction we have received. But others have said that it sounds like "old media."

The word "Phoenix" is also troubling. The bulk of our light-rail system is in Phoenix, but it also runs out to the suburbs of Tempe and Mesa. Although newbies use the word "Phoenix" to refer to the region, using "Phoenix" in our name could alienate local folks (our primary users).

As a result, we've decided to brainstorm a new list of names over the next two weeks. This will be a collaborative tool for the community, so, in that spirit, I'd like to toss out this opportunity to the Idea Lab audience for help. We can't offer fame or fortune, but we can offer that cocktail party "coolness" factor if your name -- or some mashup of names submitted below -- actually sticks.

Here are our basic guidelines:

Our project uses web, print and mobile technologies to deliver information by light-rail stop to urban audiences. They can collaborate or use it to guide themselves around the city's news, events and services.

Because of this, they should feel like they have control over their environment. This is an empowering tool for them.

It's location-based knowledge -- meaning it has an awareness at a certain point and time.

Whatever the name is, it would be nice if it could become a verb among our users (i.e., "googled").

That's it! Although we're coming up with our own list, any suggestions below in the comments are welcome. Thanks!

Needed: Real-Time Auction System for Citizen Media

Dan Gillmor — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 21:49:05 -0500

A fierce and fascinating debate has broken out over the cover photo on Time magazine's April 27 print edition. Time paid a pittance for the picture -- at least a pittance next to what big magazines normally pay for cover art -- and that's made a lot of professional photographers furious.

They should get over it. But they and their gifted-amateur and part-timer peers -- especially the ones capturing breaking news events -- should start agitating for some better marketplaces than the ones available today. More on that below, but first some background:

The marketplace for photography in the Internet era has changed irrevocably. In 2006, I argued that the professionals who will feel the pain most in the short run are the folks who shoot spot-news pictures. I said, in part:

They can't possibly compete in the media-sphere of the future. We're entering a world of ubiquitous media creation and access. When the tools of creation and access are so profoundly democratized, and when updated business models connect the best creators with potential customers, many if not most of the pros will fight a losing battle to save their careers.

This was bad news for them, I acknowledged, but not for the rest of us -- because someone with a camera (probably part of a phone) almost always would be in a position to capture relevant still photos and/or, increasingly, videos of newsworthy events. We'd have more valuable pictures, not less, and production values would take second place to authenticity and timeliness.

I also said that staff feature photographers were in less trouble. The Time cover suggests that I was premature in that assessment, though I do believe that great artists will always have a market for their work.

The rub, as anyone who spends any serious time on Flickr already knows, is that amateur photographers are doing incredible work. Few of them can match the consistent quality of what the pros do, but they don't have to. Every one of us is capable of capturing one supremely memorable image. Whatever you're looking for, you can find it on Flickr or other photo sites including the stock-photos service where Robert Lam listed the picture that ended up on Time's cover. Lam said that he was paid $30 for the photo, according to this conversation thread on the Model Mayhem photo community site, which includes some strenuous objections from pro photographers.

It does strike me as absurd that a huge magazine with huge circulation can get an image like Lam's for so little money. But that was his choice, and it was Time's choice to take advantage of the low price he was asking.

Just as some people gladly take the New York Times' absurdly low pay when their freelance articles make it into the paper's news and op-ed pages, some photographers gladly sell their work for peanuts to Time. They have their own reasons, which can range from getting valuable exposure -- so they can (try to) charge more for subsequent work -- to not needing the money staffers and more famous people can demand.

This gets trickier, it seems to me, when it comes to breaking news, where news organizations derive enormous benefits from having the right image or video at the right time and too frequently get it for less than peanuts. Indeed, practically every news organization now invites its audience to submit pictures and videos, in return for which the submitters typically get zip.

Which is why we need a more robust marketplace than any I've seen so far -- namely a real-time auction system.

The sites currently promoting citizen journalists' work don't offer anything of this sort, as far as I can tell. This isn't to say I don't like those sites, which include NowPublic and Demotix, because I like them a great deal. But someone needs to go further.

How would a real-time auction system work? The flow, I'd imagine, would go like this:

Photographer captures breaking news event on video or audio, and posts the work to the auction site. Potential buyers, especially media companies, get to see watermarked thumbnails and then start bidding. A time limit is enforced in each case. The winning bid goes to the journalist, minus a cut to the auction service.

The premium, then, would be on timeliness and authenticity. One or two images/videos would be likely to command relatively high prices, and everything else would be worth considerably less.

Eventually, someone will do this kind of business -- which could also be useful for eyewitness text accounts of events. For the sake of the citizen journalists who are not getting what they deserve for their work, I hope it's sooner rather than later.

(Cross-posted from Mediactive)

For more on Demotix and citizen photo agencies, check out this article from MediaShift by Mark Glaser.

Printcasting Goes National, Partners With MediaNews Group

Dan Pacheco — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 09:21:16 -0500

I'm very excited to announce that Printcasting.com, my 2008 Knight News Challenge project that democratizes print magazine publishing, is expanding to more U.S. cities. And I'm equally excited about the first partner: Denver-based MediaNews Group. Here's a link to the full press release about our arrangement with MediaNews. We're in discussions with other newspapers and organizations and will add more partnerships throughout the year.

So what does this mean for the average person? Up until now, the Printcasting site was focused on Bakersfield, California -- in keeping with the geographic focus objective of the Knight News Challenge. The site has been open to anyone since March, but there wasn't a way for people in other cities to create and find locally-targeted publications for their areas. Now people in Denver, Boulder, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area can also create locally-focused Printcasts in a way that lets local readers and advertisers find them.

Partners like MediaNews Group will seed those markets with content and use Printcasting the same way as everyone else, but by doing that they also provide content that the community can remix into their niche publications. When we begin to charge for self-serve advertising (which we plan to do very soon), MediaNews -- just as any content contributor -- will receive a portion of ad revenue from Printcasts that use their content. Likewise, if MediaNews -- just like any Princasting publisher -- creates Printcast publications, and they use content from local bloggers, those bloggers will receive a portion of the ad revenue. In this way, Printcasting's partnerships also create grass-roots partnerships between professional and "citizen" media that is mutually beneficial to both parties.

The experience on the Printcasting.com site doesn't change much on its face, as all of the real changes are on the back-end. When you go to the Printcasting.com home page, you'll now see a search box to "Find Printcasting Near You." Enter a zip code and it will tell you if there's a site in your town. If there is, you'll be taken straight to a site that aggregates Printcasts from your area. If not, you're asked to create a Printcast and tag it to your zip code. If we start to see a large number of Printcasts in a particular area, we'll create a site that features it like this one for Bakersfield: http://printcasting.com/bakersfield.

But we're not opening city sites for the entire U.S. just yet. Because Printcasting is such a new concept, we need people to help seed their markets with content (from blogs and professional sources) and publications that use that content. And we also need people who are willing to do the local foot work, and meet with bloggers and community organizations to show them how Printcasting can help them communicate with their audience. I invite you to register your content and create Printcasts, then let me know so that I can start to see where new geographic communities are emerging. If enough people use Printcasting from a particular area, that's a sign that we should open a city site there.

When we first announced our intention to partner, we said we'd work with any locally-focused organization that had expertise in using print to build community. The most natural partners are newspapers because they have local content, local people, and an interest in growing local audience and revenue. Printcasting offers a way for them to do that at lower cost while also leveraging content from bloggers in their communities. Local bloggers will also benefit through ad revenue share, assuming a newspaper chooses to use their content in one of their Printcasts, and that Printcast makes money. In this way, Printcasting provides a way for newspapers -- long leaders in local community development -- to work in partnership with local entreprenurial-minded content providers rather than in competition with them.

This is where MediaNews Group comes in. I met Peter Vandevanter, MediaNews Group's Vice President for Targeted Products, a year ago at his Individuated Newspaper Conference (thanks to former Rocky Mountain News editor John Temple for the introduction!) Peter has been working on his separate I-News initiative, which will soon let readers of certain MediaNews Group papers create personalized editions that contain only the content they're interested in. The approach is different from Printcasting, but the end-result is the same. It creates more opportunity for targeted advertising.

I think Peter is more committed to content personalization and what he calls "individuation" than anyone working in media today, and he proves it by running an open-invitation conference every year about personalized news. Peter is the one who came to me with the idea of using Printcasting as an internal niche-magazine engine. While that wasn't what we created Printcasting for, it made sense. Add to that his and MediaNews' openness to letting citizens in their markets create publications -- even with content that starts within MediaNews -- and we knew that we'd found our first partner.

But there are others out there who are equally interested. From the very beginning of this project we've received interest from organizations around the world -- often newspapers, but also organizations such as universities and membership groups. It started as soon as we posted a prototype in the Fall of 2008, and it caught us by surprise. We're responding to demand rather than going around asking people to participate, and that's a good sign.

Between now and December we will continue to talk to interested parties and roll out more sites in more cities. If you think your organization may be a good match, please let us know! And regardless of that, please feel free to start using Printcasting wherever you are. If you enter your zip code (or international postal code) when you create content, that will be a sign to us to open a Printcasting city site near you.

Pounding the Pavement and Planning Ahead for Printcasting

Dan Pacheco — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 12:05:06 -0500

It's been about a month since Printcasting launched in Bakersfield, and our local grassroots outreach is well under way. Every week our marketing evangelist meets with several new groups and individuals. Many of them see immediate uses for Printcasts, and we're starting to see a stream of new activity.

As of today, 180 Printcasts have been set up that have published 734 editions (You can peruse them all in the Printcasting directory ), and 144 registered content feeds. Because we're seeding the market with our own content and magazines some of these are ours, about half of this comes from the community -- which is not bad for the first month, and before we've done any serious marketing.

I'll be sharing more anecdotes about community outreach in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we continue to improve the product based on feedback from people in Bakersfield and elsewhere (for example, see this review and our response on the Metaprinter blog).

The new feature we're most proud of is a new tool that lets you create your own masthead using a photo from your hard drive.

Our development team is going down a punch list of 34 near-term projects like this. And in parallel, we're starting on the next big round of features that will launch in early summer. Those are:

1) Ad payment and controls
We're now working with The Commerce Guys in Jackson, Michigan to build out a straightforward, secure way for businesses to pay for ads (currently free during a trial period). Publishers will also be able to reject individual ads -- or all future ads from a particular business -- before those ads can appear in their Printcasts. All of this should be available in a testable mode in May, and ready to launch in June.

By the way, for you Drupal fans out there, we're really excited to have Ryan Szrama, the lead developer on the open-source Ubercart module in Drupal who recently joined the Commerce Guys team, working on the ad payment project.

2) Revenue Share
The Commerce Guys are also helping us build out a very sophisticated, but user-friendly, system that shares advertising revenue. We will be providing more information about how this will work in the future, but here's the gist.

Whenever a business places a self-serve ad in a Printcast, 60% of that money will immediately be passed on to the publisher via a Paypal account deposit. 30% will be set aside in an escrow account which is shared with contributors on Printcasting.com, and that escrow will be split among them every quarter in proportion to how much their content has been used. The final 10% will be maintained by the Printcasting network to cover ongoing hosting, development, maintenance and transactions fees.

Sharing revenue at all is fairly radical for anyone, including a newspaper. But we'll also be giving much more direct revenue to the citizen publishers on our network than most revenue-sharing services do, and for a simple reason. We feel that publishers bear the highest burden for the success of everyone on the network, and the network itself. They'll be footing most of the bill for printing, distribution and marketing of their publications to their own communities of interest, and contributors will only benefit when they do. If they incur the highest costs, we feel they should get the highest reward.

Note that the percentages above reflect only our current thinking, and they could change. One reason we can keep our portion so low is because our expenses are covered by the Knight Foundation through the end of May 2010. After that date we hope to be able to keep rev-share proportions steady, but much will depend on how much ad revenue is coming in the door by then, and how it compares to network expenses. In that sense, our own future success is also dependent on the financial success of publishers on the Printcasting network. And we like that, because it automatically aligns our interests with the interests of Printcasting.com participants.

Do you think these percentages are too high? Too low? Just right? Let us know.

3) "City Hubs"
As I've written about before, from the beginning we have seen organic demand for Printcasting in other cities. Our original plan was to extend Printcasting to five other cities starting in December, but based on all of the interest out there -- which includes interest from other newspapers -- we will be starting this rollout sooner.

City Hubs will be geographically-targeted launching pads for partners in other cities to promote Printcasting. If you don't live in Bakersfield and you want to use Printcasting, be sure to add your zip code to your Printcast at setup. This data will be used to surface your content on any future city hubs we may roll out.

I can't share which cities will be first because the partners have not been announced yet. But do let me know if you or your organization are interested in sponsoring a city for our national rollout.

4) Print on Demand
If you've ever ordered photo prints from a site like Shutterfly or ordered an on-demand book on Lulu.com, you understand what we want to do here. Imagine an "Order a Printed Copy" button on every Printcasting.com microsite and you get the idea. You click that button, enter payment details, and a few days later get a copy of the magazine at your doorstep (or perhaps pick it up at a local print provider).

When I started this project a year ago I assumed there would be numerous print services that we could tap into using free Web APIs. I was wrong in that assumption. Most of these types of companies don't have full open APIs, although some are beginning to work on them. Now that we've launched, we're finally making progress with getting some large printing companies with national footprints to talk to us, so I'm hopeful that we'll be able to add printing functionality sometime in the summer.

That's the news from Printcasting.com this week. In the future: more about revenue sharing, and how it can benefit individuals, organizations, and also newspapers and printing companies.

Waiting for the Bill (Gates) in Qatar

Amanda Atwood — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 02:40:42 -0500

It has been an exciting few weeks for Freedom Fone. We finally got back a version of our prototpye software which works with SIM cards, so we can use it here in Zimbabwe. We've been having focus group discussions with a range of people to help inform our first local deployment. And our Technical Director, Brenda Burrell, has been at ICTD 2009, giving a demo of Freedom Fone. She sent us this feedback:

Here I am in Doha, Qatar with my jacket on inside a spectacular building on the Carnegie Mellon campus. I'm seated amongst hundreds of others listening to elevator music whilst we wait for Bill Gates to give his keynote address to the ICTD 2009 participants.

This gathering has brought academics, inventors, practitioners, entrepreneurs, media, local business and royalty together to talk tech and development. Thanks to contributions from a variety of sponsors including IDRC, Qatar Telecom, Microsoft, ExxonMobil, IBM and the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science a large number of us have had travel and accommodation costs paid to facilitate our attendance.

Freedom Fone has been allocated a demo space at the venue which has been a great opportunity to share our ideas, motivation and passion for do it yourself interactive voice response deployment with visitors and participants to the conference. Although still in its alpha version, our demo software provides a useful visual and audio experience to help people understand what we're doing and where we're headed.

Freedom Fone demo ICTD009, Doha

Postscript: Bill Gates was scheduled to visit the demo stands after his address but was sadly whisked away behind the scenes by the royal queen sitting in the front row!

Printcasting Launches in Bakersfield

Dan Pacheco — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:21:14 -0500

This week we publicly launched Printcasting in Bakersfield, California. While our focus is on outreach to the 330,000 people who live there, anyone can now use the site to create an automatically updating, printable PDF magazine. I invite you all to give it a try at http://www.printcasting.com and let us know what you think. The more early usage we have the better. One easy way to get started is to browse through a list of recently updated Printcasts and subscribe to a few.

For those of you who haven't followed the progress of our Knight News Challenge funded project, the gist is that Printcasting lets anyone participate in niche magazine publishing, and if they do a good job they also stand to benefit from advertising revenue when we begin charging for self-serve ads. It's an admittedly radical idea to come out of a newspaper at a time when many newspapers are cutting back or shutting their doors. As a result, we're starting to attract media attention, with positive mentions in The Miami Herald and Business Week.

But that's all talk. We're launched, so now instead of telling you about it you can jump in and try it out. One fun way to do this is as a Printcasting subscriber. With the permission of Mark Glaser, we've set up a Printcast for this Idea Lab site. Check it out here:

The thumbnail above comes from a special blog widget that's available for any Printcast. Click on it to flip through a facsimilie of what the printed version will look like. To get a copy to print, click the Download link. And if you want to receive an e-mail whenever a new edition is available (which happens about once a day for the PBS Idea Lab blog), click "Subscribe" and provide your e-mail address.

It's also really easy to get a blog widget to promote your own Printcast, or one that you like. Just find a Printcast in the directory (or your own), then click the "Share" link at the top of the page. Copy and paste the HTML code into your blog template, and your blog or Web site promotes a printable PDF version for those who may want to print it out or read offline. When a new edition is published the thumbnail and link will update automatically.

If you have more time you can create a Printcast using feeds people have already registered, including some very good ones from The Bakersfield Californian newspaper. To get your own site's content into your Printcast or make it available for other Printcasts to carry, simply register your RSS feed. All of these tasks take only a few minutes.

You can also print a few copies yourself and leave it at local coffee shops, bars, your local library, or anywhere that people in your community may be looking for local information. That's exactly how we plan to start local promotion of Printcasting in Bakersfield, starting out with the 3,600 blogs on the Californian's eight social networking sites. In addition, those sites have more than 53,000 public user profiles, which is a good indication of active participants who may take 5 minutes out of their day to register a feed or set up a Printcast.

That's how our outreach will begin, but as with all local products, traditional street marketing is what will make Printcasting a long-term success. Our marketing evangelist Tom Webster -- armed with mouse pads and t-shirts -- is already setting up meetings with places such as the Kern County Library, which after one demo offered to let us use their computers for community training. The library's Web site also has RSS feed content, so we're showing the librarians how they can automatically feed their online content into printable flyers that people can take with them. Tom is also planning a series of blogger brunches to get bloggers on board, and also collect feedback.

Just because our initial rollout is complete doesn't mean that we're finished with development, though. This week we're testing out a feature we call "review and approve," which is akin to the copy editor telling the publisher to give a publication one last edit before it goes to the presses, and we hope to launch that very soon.

We're also gearing up to work on something a journalism major like myself never expects to be involved in: integrating e-commerce payment into the ad tool. To be honest, this is something we'd hoped to have finished by now, but we intentionally put it off so that we could give the core product the focus it deserved before launch. (Since we planned to make ads free for the first few months anyway, this doesn't hold us back at all and may even make local advertiser outreach easier -- especially in this crazy economy.)

It's been a big year, and a very big week. Thanks to all of you who have followed our progress and given us suggestions, feedback and moral support. Do us a favor and post a link to your Printcasts in a comment. And as always, let us know if you have any questions or need help.

The Community Radio Movement in India

Aaditeshwar Seth — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 03:54:34 -0500

India has been quite a latecomer to this promising channel of people empowerment through community media. Until late 2006, only educational institutions were allowed to set up campus radio stations having a transmission range of 10-15km. The scope was only recently expanded to also include non-profit agencies, agricultural research institutes, and schools, to set up community radio stations that would involve local communities in the content production process. The progress has been steady since then, although arguably somewhat slow. As of now, there are four stations that are broadcasting, and around six stations that are in advanced stages of their application approvals. I will first briefly describe the historical context of the CR movement in India, then outline certain inefficiencies in the current CR policy, enumerate a few practical problems in establishing and running CR stations in the Indian context, and finally connect the efforts of Gram Vaani and other organizations in addressing these problems.

Historical context

The importance of community media for community empowerment and democratization is well known. And voice based media are especially relevant in the Indian context, given the poor literacy levels in rural areas. However, despite radio being an efficient channel for voice-based community media, communities and independent organizations were forbidden to set up their own radio stations. Pioneering organizations such as Voices and Drishti Media therefore chose a concept called narrow casting to circumvent the policy restrictions. They worked with NGOs Myrada in Bangalore and Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan (a women collective) in Gujarat to train rural community reporters to produce audio programs just like it would be done in a radio studio. But the programs were played out over loud-speakers in common community meeting points such as near temples and at Panchayat (village level governing bodies) meetings, or within "listener groups" of women working together in mcrofinance self-help-groups. The audio production was itself done in a small studio where eminent village personalities and local politicians were invited for interviews, local artists were called in for recording folk songs, and school children were invited to recite poems and famous speeches by great personalities. Namma Dhwani (meaning, our voices), the setup at the village of Buddikote near Bangalore, even pioneered a new concept called cable casting where they used the cable TV network in the village for broadcast. This was a daring step in many ways against the repressive government policies -- since cable TV was run by local operators, Namma Dhwani could purchase air time cheaply for their own programs even though it could not run its own radio station. The channel of course did not have any video -- just a blank blue screen -- but given the high penetration of television in the community, it was a fantastic outreach channel.

Both the experimental setups near Bangalore and in Gujarat were extremely successful in empowering communities, making them realize their rights, and lobby for their demands from local authorities. Given ready evidence, enterprising activists from organizations such as Drishti, Voices, Ideosync, Maraa, One World South Asia, and many independent individuals incessantly lobbied for a policy change to get permission for radio broadcast. Their efforts were rewarded in late 2006, but the policy still remains mired with many complications.

Community radio policy

Currently, there are a number of points of dissatisfaction amongst the CR community.

Only non-profits more than 3 years old can apply for a CR license. Although this clause is present to help ensure accountability, it is restrictive for new organizations that want to venture into community radio in a dedicated manner. The older non-profits that are applying for licenses have been working in different streams such as micro-finance, low-cost housing, health, etc, and tend to look upon CR as an outreach channel for their existing programs. However, the vision and mission of CR is substantially broader and a niche domain in itself.

The license process can take well over a year. It goes through the approvals of almost five different ministries, and if the application is stuck at any point, then there are hardly any avenues to find out. Updates are rarely available on the government websites. The entire process is also very inconvenient for the applicant organizations because they are often asked to supply more details within sudden deadlines, or required to appear in person in New Delhi without any warning. One of the most significant tasks during the application process is also a community survey that is supposed to be filled out by over 1000 respondents. Although surveys are definitely valuable to assess the information needs of the communities, the specific survey mandated by the government is available only in English, and contains a whole host of amusing questions that are completely irrelevant to community radio. Many people behind the CR movement strongly feel that a one-fits-all survey is not suitable in the diverse Indian context, and applicants should be allowed to design their own surveys based upon certain specific guidelines laid down by the government. Fortunately though, the government secretaries are open to suggestions, and the process will hopefully smoothen out over time.

The FM transmitter equipment for the community radio station can be sold by only three authorized vendors. The newest vendor, Nomad, designs and manufactures indigenous transmitters, and got approval only last year after a long struggle with the bureaucratic red tape. Prior to Nomad, the transmitter equipment was available at a prohibitively enormous cost from the other vendors. At Gram Vaani, although we know that even lower cost alternatives exist, but given the approval difficulties we have deferred our development efforts on the transmitter front, and decided to focus on other components of the CR technology in priority.

The policy mandates that the CR station should be owned by a non-profit organization. This is very different from policies in Nepal where local communities can pool funds and apply for a license, or in Bolivia where it is mandatory for a CR station to be governed by a council of members elected from the community. This therefore becomes a push-based top-down approach in India, as opposed to a more desirable pull-based bottom-up approach in Nepal and Bolivia. The non-profit organization in India may or may not choose to listen to feedback from the local community, and there have been reports where feedback from certain community individuals was ignored because these people did not participate in the other development programs supported by the non-profit organization. In the same manner, since the community also may not incur any clearly-observable liability from a failure of the CR station, it would effect their levels of engagement with the radio station. Unfortunately a circular problem, this does outline the complexities of participatory community development programs.

Other challenges for community radio stations

CR stations also face other challenges, the foremost ones being financial sustainability and technology.

CR stations are permitted 5 minutes of advertising per hour. If well marketed, this could help cover the operational costs to run the CR station and pay salaries to the staff. But it is practically infeasible for resource-crunched CR station operators to acquire business skills and look for advertisers while they also produce good quality radio content. We feel that having a central agency like Gram Vaani look for advertising on their behalf will be very helpful. But it is also important to create other revenue streams for community radio. We have a number of interesting ideas based on coupling radio with telephony services, that we will outline in a subsequent post.

The setup used by most stations is quite basic -- just a computer and mic, connected to the FM transmitter via a mixer. Although simplicity is good, the lack of interactive systems such as telephones, field reporting tools, and content sharing, makes it harder to sustain engagement from the community. Even software used to run the radio station can have a significant impact on its success. Most CR stations currently use Winamp to play out radio programs, and have to resort to hacks to do live broadcast, or interleave advertisements between programs. A professional radio automation system is very necessary to scale activities, but currently there is no free and open-source system that provides a one-stop solution to playout, broadcast, telephony, SMS, and Internet content sharing.

The current push behind the CR movement

We are very glad that our Knight funding came at an opportune time to enable us to make a significant impact in the growth of community radio in India. Gram Vaani is among the early players in the area of improving technology for community radio, and building a business model around making CR stations financially sustainable. Please take a look at our earlier post on details of the kind of software and hardware systems we are building for community radio. We will shortly also write about our current thinking on the business model of enabling services through radio and telephony.

The Gram Vaani team and other CR activists are also part of the Community Radio Forum, a pan-India collective whose most important mandate is to lobby for legislative changes on the CR policy front. The third annual meeting of the CR Forum was held last month at a small town called Orchha, in the Bundelkhand region of India. Orchha was chosen because the very first community radio station licensed under the new policy was established there by Development Alternatives five months back. It was widely attended by almost all organizations in the community media space in India, including Gram Vaani. Anita Iyer from Radio and Music has written a detailed article on the meeting. Please do take a look for more information and some fantastic pictures.

The road is long, as all roads always are, but it has been a terrific start so far. The one thing I can definitely vouch for though, is that the enthusiasm and commitment of the CR community in India is undying, and will continue to push the horizons of community media indefinitely.

Printcasting in BusinessWeek Story about Newspaper Innovation

Dan Pacheco — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 11:25:33 -0500

Printcasting is mentioned in a BusinessWeek story about "online experiments that could help newspapers". The story leads with Bakotopia.com, the social networking site I started for The Bakersfield Californian back in 2005. This is fitting, as Bakotopia's later success with a printed magazine helped inspired the Printcasting concept. The story also cites other good examples of things newspaper companies are doing to change with the times, including collaboration with Outside.in and Yahoo and the upcoming Plastic Logic e-reader.

This is great timing for us, as we recently opened our beta site to the public and are putting the final pieces in place to publicly launch in Bakersfield later this month. Here are some excerpts worth mentioning:

"... the independent, family-owned Californian is preparing to take the idea of Web-created niche magazines national. Using an $837,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge and about $200,000 of its own money, it's launching a site called Printcasting.com later in March. The site will allow individuals, schools, homeowners' associations, wine clubs, and the like to create their own digital magazines. 'If we see a magazine that really has potential, we'll print it, place additional ads in there, and distribute it, [first in Bakersfield, then in five other cities as early as this summer],' Pacheco says. The Californian will get a cut of ad sales while spending little on the product itself. 'This is cheap and targeted,' Pacheco explains. 'Even though there's an ad recession, it doesn't mean there're no more ads.' "

And later on ...

"This reinvention is taking publishers such as Bakersfield Californian away from selling ads just for their own news content. 'Our future may be very different from how we started, in newspapers,' Pacheco says. '[Going forward], we are the network that allows people to communicate among themselves.'"

That accurately sums up what we're trying to do with Printcasting. Thanks to senior writer Olga Kharif for good reporting.

Of course the real story will begin once we launch later this month and are able to point to how regular old people are using Printcasting to make their own magazines and newsletters. Our local outreach is already starting in beta, and I can tell that what people do with these tools will ultimately be far more interesting than the tools themselves. The same has been true of Bakotopia and other social-media initiatives -- connecting with people and allowing them to connect with each other is what the user-generated content space is really about.

Technorati Tags: printcasting, knight news challenge, newspaper industry

Breaking Even While Staying True to the Margins

Amanda Atwood — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 06:27:40 -0500

We recently applied to present Freedom Fone: Dial-up Information Service at an upcoming ICT for Development workshop. Our application was eventually accepted, but not before concerns were raised that Freedom Fone might be on its way to becoming a for-profit entity, which would be inconsistent with the conference sponsors' objectives.

This was an ironic obstacle for us to encounter, particularly at a time when we're beginning to think through what our business model is going to look like as we move toward self-sufficiency. We are committed to making information accessible to people at the margins of society. And Freedom Fone is intentionally being developed as open source software. These decisions reflect our core values as an organisation. But they don't make it easy to think of an income model that can support us in our work.

Freedom Fone provides callers with information at their own convenience - they don't have to hope that they catch the Public Service Announcement on TV, or tune into the radio broadcast at the right time, they can phone the service at their convenience, and get information on demand.

But, unlike radio or television, making a phone call costs money. The longer you stay on the phone, the more it costs. So the pricing of voice services plays a role in their uptake. If your target audience is poor and marginalised communities in developing countries, you know they don't have a lot of disposable income. But you also know they don't generally have no income. Here in Zimbabwe, they're earning money from informal trading, and relatives in the Diaspora are transferring money to help support them. You also know that phone tariffs are high - and they charge by the minute. So you have to make all your content count. And how do you make the service affordable, and still move towards a business model that can sustain your work? You can offer a call back service or toll free number, so that the call is free to the caller. But then you have to cover the cost. Another option is to hope that some friendly telco believes enough in your service to provide you a toll free number for free. But what if you're working in a country where price controls have driven companies into debt, and sponsoring community info lines is the last thing on their list.

One idea is to subsidise one service with revenue from another. According to John West in the recent Internews Europe survey, The Promise of Ubiquity, the Jasmine News Service has found a market with a micro-finance model. In Sri Lanka, around 100,000 subscribers each pay 30 US cents a month to receive SMS news alerts. This is a great idea - but you'd have to have a lot of SMS subscribers, and low bulk messaging rates, to be able to cross subsidise a call-in service. Another idea is to charge callers for what they will pay for (such as jobs, sports and dating information) and using those proceeds to subsidise free call-ins for development information. We've also toyed with getting paid advertising - particularly should the service prove popular and have high participation rates. But there's the risk of resentment from callers who then have to pay not only for the call, but to listen to the adverts as well.

Over on Steven Clift's News Online email list, there is a similar discussion going on, among journalists who face retrenchment as traditional journalism cuts back on staff, but who want to continue to do the work they love - and earn money in the process.

We're in the early phases of thinking through what a self-funded model of Freedom Fone might look like. We know that the information that can earn the best income might not be the kind of information we are most committed to sharing and making more accessible to people. But we also know that it would be less than ideal to create a whole separate entity that earns money - but which means double the work. So we're open to suggestions from others who have experience or advice to share on this score.

Сthulhu, Dr. Zoidberg & the Teacher of English to Symbolize the Olympics

Alexander Zolotarev — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 08:32:05 -0500

On the web, choosing the mascot of the Sochi Olympics was probably the most discussed topic around the 2014 Winter Games. What is great with the Olympics is that being a global, international affair, each time it presents the local quintessence of the hosting city. Simply put, the symbol reflects the local Olympic dream as well as the local customs and traditions and the soul of the place where they are held. That's why choosing the symbol of the Olympics usually stirs vibrations and high response from people.

When I just arrived in NYC as a Fulbrighter from Moscow in September 2007, I first stayed for a couple of weeks in Brooklyn. I took the Q Train from Avenue H to Times Square where the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism is located. It would take me one coke, one donut and 20 pages of 'Convergence Culture' one way. 'Convergence Culture' by Henry Jenkins was the first book I chose out of a wide selection in the CUNY J-School's Library. I had definitely heard about Henry Jenkins before going to the States, but I never read 'Convergence Culture' - the so well-known book, which reveals the improvisation around fandom and pop culture on the web, and it actually became itself an object of fandom for so many readers. I absolutely loved the book and was perusing it. Later I would interview Mr. Jenkins for my dissertation in his MIT campus apartment, but then, in the Q Train, I had yet no idea about it...

I again remembered Mr. Jenkins' book while surfing thru the web and coming across an extravagant group to lobby Futurarama's Dr. Zoidberg for the Symbol of the Sochi Olympics. The group was parked at the social network Vkontakte (which means 'in contact'), the Russian counterpart of Facebook, which has a very similar design, icons and functions.

Let's take a look at the Olympics and the Olympic movement as the mass culture phenomenon, a chance to improvise and express yourself.

'Zoidberg for the Olympics' club is positioned as a 'proposal to the organizers of the Games', tagged as 'Creativity' and categorized as an 'Art and Entertainment' group. There are over 46 000 members in it. And all Zoidberg multimedia relics are here: his famous Woo-Woo-Woo audios and the e-graffiti Z's portraits - the members' contributions. The lobster-alien Dr. John A. Zoidberg, M.D. himself is delicately integrated into the Sochi 2014 logotype.

I wonder if those guys who inspired the movement for Dr. Zoidberg actually submitted their candidate to the Sochi Olympic Organizing Committee when it announced the contest for the emblem. The submissions - most of them relating to the sea, mountains, snow, sports, animals - included various types of bear, a sea gulf, a crab, a mammal, a squirrel with five golden nuts, a snowman and a skiing Santa-Claus, and even five gas tubes arranged as Olympic rings... but it was a skiing dolphin, supported by the majority of voters, which became the winner: you can often see those drifting in hoards in the Black Sea by the shore... The official mascot, according to the algorythm, will be chosen after the Vancouver Games.

It's a good and entertaining idea to promote Dr. Zoidberg for the Olympic emblem, though it's pretty challenging to prove that he is the best one for this role. It looks easier to justify the rights of a dolphin or even a mermaid for the position. So the group admins aspire to be imaginative and inventive to sound convincing. The arguments they bring are as follows:
Dr. Zoidberg 'was born earlier than the Hen and the egg', 'he has cured many people', 'he is so cute'. But he has never been in Sochi yet, so that he doesn't get cold there (like Renée Zellweger's character in the movie 'New in Town'), they introduce an e-questionnaire, asking the members of the group to choose what he should bring with him to Sochi not to freeze. And the possible answers are: a hat, a scarf, a shell, a bottle of vodka (ah...), mittens for pincers...but it's the glove for the nose which is the hit answer... Well, those guys are getting wild.

In contrast, someone creates a group claiming that it's much fairer to declare Olympics as the symbol of Dr. Zoidberg, and not vice versa, cause of Zoidberg is everlasting and perpetual, and the Games are recurrent, just once in two years.

But this way or another, Dr. Zoidberg as a symbol is immensely popular. (Just to add here, other candidates as well found their fans, who also started similar fan groups within the social networks. But while Dr. Zoidberg boasts thousands of fans, the Mammal has only 869, the Beaver - 284, and SpongeBob SquarePants - 223. Another candidate is another mass culture giant - Cthulhu, the mythic octopus-like creature. He has 61 backers only, but this group is a closed community).

Those graphic experiments with the Olympics Symbol are, beyond doubt, a source of inspiration for many amateur designers who improvise and replicate. In one of the pictures Cthulhu is artfully married to Cheburashkah, the star of Soviet cartoons, a Russian analogue of Mickey Mouse. (A red Cheburashkah was, by the way, the real symbol of the Russian team at the Beijing Olympics). It's all fine with the 'Dr. Zoidberg for the Sochi Olympics' fan-club. It's creative and motivating to use imagination. The only thing is that it is actually more about Dr. Zoidberg, by and for his avid fans, and not so much about the Olympics.

As for the Olympics, the IOC is figuring out these days how best and most effectively to use the new media, the web and the digital revolution - not only to keep the reputation of the Olympics as the grandest world event but to further promote this social perception. As known, the 2008 Beijing Games had the largest TV audience ever (4.7 billion TV viewers worldwide), but it was for the first time that certain Olympic moments were officially broadcast on a dedicated YouTube channel in the States (about three hours a day only, but they say the hardcore Olympics fans used the proxy servers to see more on the web).

When the 1980 Moscow Olympics unfolded, I was not around yet. There was no internet as well. The Olympics were extremely important for the Soviet Union, and when the gas balloon Bear - or simply 'Mishka', the symbol of the Games - flew off into the sky on the closing day, tears were pouring from the people's eyes. They wanted the symbol to stay and the Olympic shows to go on. It would be unimaginable back then in 1980 to have a TV cartoon character lobbied - even as a joke - for the Symbol of the Games. But now there is a group of Fans of that Bear. Some suggested Mishka as the symbol of the coming Olympiad again. But this time, they said, the bear should be white and polar as those are winter games.

I think that the most appealing candidate however is no animal, no cartoon or computer game character, but a real person - the teacher of English from a Sochi public school Ms. Sudorova Tamara Sergeyevna, lobbied by her 39 adoring students in a special group 'Sudorova as the Olympics Symbol'. Funny. But if we take a closer look, the teacher's role in the preparations for the Olympics is pretty high: she is basically enabling the younger citizens of Sochi to fluently speak English with the visiting athletes and spectators in 2014. And, though being so different from other candidates, I think Ms. Sudorova should not be undervalued as an unspoken Symbol.

PS Some Chuck Norris fan also suggested the actor to be the symbol of the Games.

Putting Our Plane on the Runway

Dan Pacheco — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 20:24:09 -0500

Printcasting, our Knight News Challenge project to democratize print publishing, entered closed beta last week. An open beta is just around the corner, and we're doing everything we can to officially launch in Bakersfield in early March. To make that happen, two camps -- development and marketing -- are busy getting everything into place for a successful launch.

In development, all of our focus is on completing a few last critical features, including the creation of automatic, self-updating Printcast editions. And we're making great progress!

In the marketing camp, we're busy tweaking messaging, writing FAQs, giving live demos and building lists of potential citizen publishers, bloggers and businesses for our outreach plan. We've even brought a new person into our team, Tom Webster, who will focus exclusively on evangelizing Printcasting locally in Bakersfield. Tom is a well-respected, active blogger on Bakersfield.com (our newspaper's main site), and he has a lot of ties into the local community.

And in the middle of all this, international attention on Printcasting continues to grow. I was interviewed by Nora Young from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's technology show, "Spark". You can listen to that show and read about some other projects with similarities to Printcasting on the Spark web site.

We'd love to get more people into the beta test (and it's easy -- just request membership to this group and I'll let you in). But we know that most people just want to see what we're up to. The video below provides a glimpse into the most important piece of the product: the magazine-creation machine. You can watch a publisher on the beta site choosing feeds, layouts and design elements to create an automatically-generated PDF that can be used to print an 8-page magazine.

Printcasting Publisher Demo - Closed Beta from Dan Pacheco on Vimeo.

It's fun and just a little embarrassing to compare this to the prototype video I posted four months ago, not to mention the early concept video from 8 months ago, which consisted of a few sketches and a Powerpoint. It's a reminder to me of the iterative nature of product development, and the importance of continually refining ideas until you get them right.

I'm certain that a few months after we launch and hundreds of regular people in Bakersfield are using Printcasting to create their own magazines, there will be even more changes that are driven by how people use the product. And when we compare that version to what we have now, we'll look back and see how far we've come as we have very likely renovated major pieces of the house that is Printcasting.

This may sound like a big ball of stress, and sometimes it is, but it's also what makes creative people tick. Good product people live to take risks and help ordinary people do extraordinary things with technology. To do that right, you have to be excited by the idea of endless creation and re-creation that's informed by how people respond to what you put out there. All of us working on this project can't wait to see our assumptions tested by the hyperlocal community of Bakersfield, and respond to their feedback with something even better. In that sense, beta is simply a practice run for the next 15 months or more of our lives. We can't wait!

Building a Social Entrepreneurial Garage Startup in India

Aaditeshwar Seth — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 12:43:16 -0500

Moving from ideas to execution is an ultra cool feeling. Gram Vaani is finally on the go and we are all extremely excited to see our dreams taking shape.

The garage startup mode

I always used to wonder what a Silicon Valley garage startup would feel like. Well, here's what it looks like -- a social entrepreneurial garage startup in India. This is Bala in his pyjamas, with dozens of audio cables and connectors strewn out on his desk in a manner that only he understands. Bala spends part of his day reading Kafka, and the rest of his day and night drinking coffee and coding. Sometimes he also listens to Pink Floyd and drinks beer, and believe me, Java programs written under the intoxicating influence of Floydian melodies most often produce results that can at best be described only as "interesting".

Well, here's the rest of the story. I wrapped up my PhD in computer science from the University of Waterloo in October 2008, and moved back to India in November. My first month was pretty much spent in settling down in New Delhi. Although I have lived in India all my life except for the last five years in Canada, the rate of change here has been tremendous and it took me quite a while to feel that I was back at home. I finally found a good place to stay, and we set up the Gram Vaani office in one of the rooms in my house. A couple of tables, a couple of chairs, a couple of computers, and loads of audio equipment all over the place! It is indeed no different from operating a garage startup, except that this startup is not here to make big money but to pursue a big vision for community media.

And we are not alone in this vision. Bala, a very close friend, was with me at Waterloo. He did his Masters in computer science from Waterloo and was working for a while in India before joining Gram Vaani earlier in January 2009. The third member of our technical team, Zahir, will also be joining us in another week or so. Zahir is doing his PhD in computer science from IIT Bombay in the area of ICTD (Information and Communication Technologies for Development). His thesis is already centered around wireless networks for rural areas, and so Gram Vaani will pretty much form a part of his thesis.

But we will be getting out of this garage mode quite soon. Our proposal for incubation at IIT Delhi, one of the premier engineering universities of India, was recently accepted. We will move to our new office in a few weeks. The IIT incubation is extremely useful because it will avoid significant bother for us on the infrastructure setup, give us a lot of credibility, and also provide access for collaboration with the students and faculty at IIT.

The technology

We now have a good handle on the technical design and tools that we will be using. Our first step is to build a radio automation system that goes beyond much of what is already available on open-source. This automation system will provide the following kinds of features:

Playout and scheduling of audio programs
Archiving of live broadcasts
Semantically searchable media library for storing audio, video, image, and text content
Telephony support to allow audience to dial into the radio station and share their viewpoints, both online and offline
SMS support to allow audience to send SMSes to the radio station

And all this hosted on off-the-shelf hardware components, at a cost less than $1000 per community radio station.

The second step will be to connect radio stations situated in remote geographical areas to the Internet. We will do this using long distance WiFi links because broadband of other infrastructure based forms of Internet access are not available in rural areas. This will allow us to provide the following additional features:

Content sharing platform to let radio stations to exchange content with each other
Conduct simultaneous syndicated broadcasts across a series of radio stations
Service hosting platform to push advertisements, agricultural advice, news updates, NGO feedback, etc to the CR stations

The third step will be to use FM PCI cards for radio broadcast, instead of the standard FM transmitters that are big and clunky and expensive. Our goal is to keep the hardware and setup cost for the entire system, including Internet connectivity, below $2500 per community radio station. But this is in no way going to be easy. Reduction in hardware cost implies that we will be doing more and more processing in software by eliminating external components such as mixers and audio switchers. This means that our implementation has to be extremely efficient to ensure that audio latency is minimal, despite the increased computation. Plus, our choice of computation platform is governed by its power consumption, so that it can run on solar power since the electricity situation in Indian villages is extremely erratic; this potentially leaves us with platforms like Soekris or Via boxes which have only 533MHz to 1.6GHz computational capability. Other than tackling such performance issues, we will have to ensure that our system is robust and can be locally repaired through simple troubleshooting guides or telephone calls because it will not be easy for technicians to travel to remote villages for repair services, the travel time some times being up to 3 days one way.

The bottomline -- we are having a lot of fun building this system because it is so real and challenging!

The business model

Our technology is going to reduce the setup cost for anybody putting up a community radio station. They will only have to purchase off-the-shelf hardware, download our software, and follow instructions to set it up. But how are the radio stations going to sustain themselves over time? The policies in India do allow for five minutes of advertising per hour, but getting advertisers to actually pay can be quite difficult. How can a small non-profit operator in a remote village convince some big company to pay them a minuscule percentage of their advertising budget? The lack of accountability, reachability, and business skills are significant problems here. Gram Vaani's model is to search for advertisers on behalf of the radio stations, and then distribute the revenues to the radio stations that broadcast these advertisements. As is said, it may be easy for a big fish to talk to a big fish, but not easy for many small fish to talk to a big fish. Gram Vaani may not be a big fish itself, but we are confident that over time we will be able to create visibility for community radio among corporate groups looking for rural outreach.

Internally, we prefer to consider advertisements as a kind of service. Gram Vaani will also help provide other services by connecting community radio stations with various information providers. For example, health agencies can be considered as information providers that want to push health related educational information to rural areas. Similarly, agricultural institutes, microfinance agencies, health insurance agencies, etc are all interested in reaching out to rural areas -- we will help connect them with the radio stations, and build an integrated billing and revenue sharing infrastructure so that the community radio stations can acquire sufficient content for programming and sufficient financial revenues to sustain themselves.

Two other founding members of our team, Mayank and Parminder, are actively talking to various groups and radio stations to formulate the business model in greater detail. Mayank is an MBA from IIM Lucknow with a great deal of strategy experience for various businesses. And Parminder has already been working on information services in rural areas -- his sister company, eGovServices, helps put up Internet kiosks in villages to provide e-governance services. The technical and business teams wonderfully complement each other and it is an exciting exercise during our common meetings to understand each other's terminologies and language and thinking methodologies.

The way forward

Other than figuring out the technology and the business model, there are many more issues. How do we get community radio to scale in India? Do we leave the movement to pick up on its own pace, or can be do better? Maybe talk to governments and convince them to give funds for statewide networks of radio stations, or convince corporate groups such as vernacular newspapers to do the same, or maybe banks... We continuously think and debate about these issues to figure out the best way forward. But scaling a bottom-up community initiates in a top-down planned manner has a different challenge to it. How do the communities get a feeling of ownership of the radio stations if it was created without their involvement? Maybe we need to evolve a system of joint ownership of the radio stations, part of it being owned by the government or some company, and part of it by the community; financial ownership is probably the first step towards inculcating operational ownership. Unfortunately, the current community radio policy in India does not permit this kind of a organizational setup. But maybe there are other ways and only time will tell. We are prepared to learn as we go along, and adapt our methods based on what we learn. Please do stay tuned on more updates.