Information Society Watch

September 2007, Joseph Rodriguez, Jhistory

Waves of Opposition: Labor and the struggle for democratic radio, Elizabeth Fones-Wolf's book on the history of the US labour movement's radio, narrates the conflict between business and labour interests to appropriate radio. This review of the book expresses reservations about the how the book pits a noble labour movement against evil business interests, thus ignoring internal divisions, as well the changing economic landscape, consumer preferences, and technological developments.

December 4, 2007, mediaforfreedom.com

Uruguay has passed a Community Broadcasting Bill that recognises community broadcasting in its own right alongside state and private sectors and says television and radio frequencies should be more equitably distributed. A regulatory council of government, media, university and free expression representatives will collaborate to grant and renew frequencies and ensure that the government does not use frequency allocation to indirectly censor broadcasts.

August 10, 2007, Dan Nystedt, IDG News Service

Wikia is a search engine project that seeks to challenge the established way of building search engines today, which has been traditionally a secretive world of closely guarded algorithms and data. The article looks at the Wikia model for building a search engine, which follows a collaborative approach to the problem as well as making the algorithm and data public to leverage the power of open source.

August 14, 2007, Carol Ellison, MuniWireless

This story of a community wireless network comes from Italy where the creator of Italy's first community computing lab, Gigi Tagliapietra, shares his experiences. He argues for placing the community at the forefront of the entire process and is against positioning technology as the primary driver, since it is after all a 'community' network.

2002, Ian Pringle and M.J.R. David, The Electronic Journal on Information Systems in Developing Countries (EJISDC)

In this paper, the authors present the UNESCO funded Kothmale Community Radio and Internet project in central Sri Lanka as a potential model for increasing rural ICT usage. Kothmale was unique in placing the internet project within a community radio resource, and this convergence of media led to increased local ICT capacity and also expansion in the community radio itself.

August 2005, S. Derek Turner

The author contends that an FCC report published by the FCC Chairman, overstates broadband penetration rates, service quality, and the competitive conditions of the marketplace. The standard the FCC uses to measure “high-speed” connections is misleading and low. The FCC uses a misleading measure of broadband coverage.

November 20, 2006, The Hindu

Thanks to the recent clearing of the proposal to licence community radio stations, a group of four Dalit women will be broadcasting an hour-long programme from India's first community radio station. The station has been set up by Deccan Development Society (DDS), an NGO, through funding by UNESCO.

October 18, 2006, The Hoot

The Indian government has moved forward on a decision allowing NGOs to apply for licences without a fee and to have five minutes of advertising per hour of radio broadcasting.

Heather Creech, UNESCO

This study assesses what can be learned from UNESCO's pilot phase of establishing Community Multimedia Centers (CMCs) in communities across Latin America/Caribbean, Africa and South Asia.

July 18, 2006, Mike Hickcox, Communication Initiative

The author, from the United Methodist News Service (UMNS), traveled to South Africa, Uganda and Kenya to visit some of the community radio stations being launched and implemented to share information and raise awareness.