Distraction Therapy

This evening I met with Gareth Lapworth and Owen Williams to discuss the culture of open source software and ICT support for community-focussed organisations. We discussed how this collaborative and cooperative way of working might be used by people involved in community media projects. The challenge according to Owen and Gareth is to avoid prescriptive and proprietorial processes, and instead to think about ICT development as a leanring opportunity with an emphasis on collaboration and innovation. We chatted over a pint in the Two Tailed Lion on Milstone Lane in Leicester.

Tonight’s Decentered Podcast was recorded at the Leicester Documentary Media Festival with John Coster. Taking part in the discussion was Ulrike Kubatta, Catherine Taylor, Christopher Bevan and Daniel Clifford.

Ulrike Kubatta is an award-winning writer, producer and director of documentary films with a wealth of professional experience in film production and higher education. She is the Founder of Showdown Films + Training and the Director of The DocHub@DMU at Leicester Media School, De Montfort University. Catherine Taylor is a graduate of BSc Media Production student, MA Digital Arts student. Christopher Bevan is a freelance director with a focus on developing high quality film and video content. Looking to work in commercial production and have a keen interest in feature film development. Currently directing and producing a diverse portoflio of film, commercial and music related promotional work. Daniel Clifford is Programme Delivery Coordinator (Midlands) for In To Film. He has worked for a film education charity, an Arts Council National Portfolio Organisation, and has run a creative literacy business.

 

 

Today I travelled over to Birmingham to have a chat with Dean Kavanagh, who is the station manager for Switch Radio. We had a good chat about the importance of community radio as a way of bringing communities together, and how the challenge of producing audio helps us to learn something about ourselves and helps us to reflect on the role that we play in our communities. We talked about the need for partnerships and colaboration between community radio stations if we want to take advantage of the new Small Scale DAB platforms that are coming into being in the next couple of years.

Liverpool Community Radio will start broadcasting on FM across the city of Liverpool in 2019. I visited Steve Faragher to find out more about the ethos of the station, how community radio can be useful for building a sense of community, and how to focus on what is distinctive about the voices that come from across commuities in different ways. I was fascinated by Steve’s experience and ideas about maintining communty radio as something that is distinct from commercial or BBC media, and how the challenges of developing programming that is relevent to a sense of place, identity and class can often get overlooked in the community development process. Slightly longer than usual, but the conversation was engrossing.

Today I had a chance to catch-up again with Sam Hunt from Leicester Community Radio. We discussed how developing community radio stations, both broadcast and online, can create accountable content that speaks directly with the communities that they are from and represent. I liked Sam’s approach to building a communiy of listeners, and the difference that community media can make in a multimedia and digitally enabled social world.

On a lovely autumn day in Leicester, I took a walk up the canal so I could visit Vijay Umrao at EavaFM. We had a discussion about the role of multi-language-based community radio, learning to become a community radio station manager, how communities with high-levels of immigration have responded to Brexit, and how community radio breaks down barriers and supports conversations.

Dimple Patel is the station manager for Radio2Funky, which will be launching in Leicester in 2019. Dimple chatted with me today about her background in community engagment and radio production, and explained how Radio2Funky will engage young people in Leicester with a focus on urban music, arts and culture. We met at the Adult Education centre in Leicester, in the cafe on what felt like the first proper autumn day of the year.

Community Radio in Leicester is thriving. The city now has three well established station, EvaFM, Takeover Radio and DemonFM. A new station, 2FunkyRadio will be coming in 2019 after winning a licence to broadcast to the city from Ofcom in the last round of applications. What was amazing was that six groups in total applied for this licences, which shows how much interest there is in developing a broader range of radio voices in Leicester.

I visited Leicester Community Radio, who are an online radio station based at the African-Caribbean Centre in Leicester, and I spoke with Des and Sam about what LCR is trying to achieve and how they see the station making a difference in Leicester.

When we think about the social impact of community media and community radio, we are often encouraged to explain the benefit of what we do in terms of statistics and things that we can meansure. But understanding the role of community media and community radio in our communities means that we often have to think in very different ways. This means being open to ideas about creativity, collaboration and a diversity of voices and a range of capabilities. This podcast is a conversation with Lucinda Guy, who is the chair person of the Community Media Associaiton and the Artistic Director of Sound Art Radio. We spoke over Skype and discussed Lucinda’s ethos of creative appraoches to sound, radio and working collaboratively with people in our different communities. If you want to discuss or share your views about any of these issues, why not sign-up to the CMA Chat Forum.