Richard Poynder continues his amazing series of in-depth interviews on the emergence of an open and free culture, which we have also been indexing here.
This time, he is writing about a new type of open radio station,
Just below are some excerpts from the introduction to convey this important trend, but reading the whole article is strongly recommended. At the bottom, we copy Richard’s appeal on how to make his own open and free efforts sustainable.
You can listen to KRUU-FM “Open Views” interviews with luminaries of the open and free culture movement here.
1. Why is KRUU an open radio?
“KRUU is more than just a community radio station: it is also a grassroots initiative with a deep commitment to the principles advocated by the various free and open movements. Or as station manager James Moore more extensively described it during the inaugural Open Views programme, KRUU is “grassroots, community, public, non-profit, open radio.”
Moore’s use of the term “open radio” caught my attention. What, I wondered, did he mean?
Amongst other things, it seems, he meant that KRUU has made a commitment to use only Open Source software. As KRUU founder Roland Wells explained on Open Views, all KRUU’s PCs run on the GNU/Linux operating system, and the audio editing tools (Ardour and Audacity) used by DJs at the station are also Open Source. Likewise, the office suite used by Moore to administer the station (Evolution) is Open Source, and the station’s web site was built using Free BSD UNIX, and is hosted on the Open Source web server Apache.
By using Open Source solutions rather than proprietary software, Wells told KRUU listeners, the station has saved “tens of thousands of dollars”.
2. Why is KRUU participatory?
“Fairfield’s 10,000 or so citizens not only get to hear a lot of local content, but they provide it themselves.
As The Des Moines Register put it a November news report, “In Fairfield, any breathing resident may be stopped on the street and asked to host a radio show.”
To date, 150 local residents have volunteered to help run KRUU, and 70 of them now host their own shows. Practically all these DJs, moreover, have no previous experience whatsoever of radio broadcasting.
In other words, in true Open Source fashion, KRUU has spurned a top-down model in favour of a bottom-up, do-it-yourself approach. And where traditional radio stations aspire to little more than pumping out an endless flow of anodyne, mass-produced programming, KRUU invites local citizens to select the kind of programming they want, and then produce it themselves.”
3. How to support Richard Poynder’s ongoing interview project?
Note from Richard Poynder:
If you wish to read this article in its entirety please click on the link below. I am publishing it under a Creative Commons licence, so you are free to copy and distribute it as you wish, so long as you credit me as the author, do not alter or transform the text, and do not use it for any commercial purpose.
Please note that while I am making the article freely available to all, I am a freelance journalist by profession, and so make my living from writing. To assist me to continue making my work available in this way I invite anyone who reads the article to make a voluntary contribution to my PayPal account.
I have in mind a figure of $8, but whatever anyone felt inspired to contribute would be fine by me. Payment can be made quite simply by quoting the e-mail account: [email protected]. It is not necessary to have a PayPal account to make a payment.
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