radio

Beating censorship in Zimbabwe via SMS

March 4, 2007 | KatrinVerclas

file under:
mobileactive, radio, sms, zimbabwe

Gerry Jackson reports on Media Helping Media about the radio station SW Radio Africa outsisde of London that is sending sms headlines about news in Zimbabwe to it's subscriber base of about 2,000 mobile users. Jackson writes:

"We generate news headlines on a daily basis anyway - so this is just another way of using what already exists.

It’s nice and cost effective for any additional donor because there is only the one cost, actually sending the texts. In two months we’ve built up an address database of about 2,000 mobile phone numbers. Like many, Zimbabweans truly love their mobile phones and of course what we’re banking on is the virus effect.
We also get up to 100 requests a day to be added to the service so it’s growing rapidly. What becomes interesting is what business model to use?
Read More >>

KatrinVerclas's blog

Community Radio and SMS -- A Guest Post by Bruce Girard

July 15, 2008 | KatrinVerclas

file under:
citizen media, community media, community radio, mobile advocacy, radio, sms

By Bruce Girard, reposted with permission.

At first glance SMS text messages would seem like a natural for inclusion in a community radio station’s essential toolkit. SMS messages are inexpensive and easy-to-use and in recent years the mobile phones that are needed for sending and receiving them have become ubiquitous. However, an informal survey of recent projects indicates that use of SMS messages among community media in the developing world is still at an early stage. In most stations SMS use is informal. The few cases identified of community stations making more complex use of SMS messages have accompanied political crises or natural disasters and have inevitably been donor financed. There are few, if any, experiences of complex uses of SMS by community media without external funding and technical support, even though the financial and technical resources required are minimal.

Dialup Radio

file under:
advocacy, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), IVR, radio

operates in:
United States

contact:
http://www.dialupradio.org/

Dialup Radio is a tool that distributes human rights and independent media via telephone. Brief radio-style audio files are uploaded and managed via the Dialup Radio website. These files are immediately available to callers who phone the project phone number. Our software automatically generates interactive voice response (IVR) menus that enable callers to naviage audio content using their telephone keypads. Dialup radio works with any telephone, and can be adopted for a variety of activist campaigns.

Dialup Radio has been designed specifically to meet the needs of human rights activists in the developing world.

References / Past Projects

Project History
Dialup Radio was first conceived in the spring of 2006. An initial prototype was completed later that year. Initial testing and ongoing collaboration with human rights activists have lead to further refinements. A pilot deployment is anticipated for summer 2007.

Technology
Dialup Radio consists of a web-based content management system written in Ruby/Rails, and an Asterisk-based telephony server. All software is open-source, and will be released to the public in the fall of 2008.

Contact
For additional information, please contact tad at media dot mit dot edu.

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